This week, while I was playing with a new word processor program, I was reminded of Microsoft Word - in particular how in-grained it has become in day to day computing. It seems that any word processor that dares to come onto the market these days must inevitably be reviewed in light of how it compares to MS Word, and more importantly, it must be able to import & export MS Word’s native ‘doc’ format.

Every now & then you may receive the occasional doc file from people at your work or in your home email box. The normal course of action would be to open it with Microsoft Word – if you have it.

I’m one of those people who doesn’t, for the simple reason that, while I could buy a copy of Microsoft Office and be done with it, I barely have use for 90-odd percent of Microsoft Office’s feature set (everything but the kitchen sink, it seems) so I can’t really justify spending the kind of money that Microsoft are asking, just to open a few files. So what solutions are there for a guy like me?

Read on for an Inspect My Gadget investigation…

Speaking as a graphic designer, I often find a lot of people seem to be treating Microsoft Word like a Desktop Publishing & Page Layout program, and that bugs me for two reasons:

1. Word is not, and was never designed to be, a page layout program and
2. The more complex a Word document gets, the harder it becomes for any other program apart from Word to open it.

Which leads to the “inspection” part of this article; Some Word documents I receive are nice & straightforward - a couple of pages of styled text, perhaps with a header & footer. Most of the time, I’ll receive a document that’s been peppered with any combination of graphics, tables, headers/footers, whatever. It’s all fine if you happen to use Word, but what about other word processors? How much gets lost in translation? And how close to the original can I get without breaking the bank?

Before we proceed, bear in mind we’re not covering every word processor out there, nor is this intended to be an in-depth review of word processors. Your mileage may vary.

While we are aware of Office 2007’s new Open XML (.docx) format, we won’t be covering it in this article. At the time of writing, docx is still a relatively new format - it has not had nearly enough time to spread and establish itself widely as a potential standard. Microsoft, of course, are doing all they can to make sure it does. Even so, people these days are less inclined to upgrade their software as long as whatever they have now is working fine for them, so docx has got a long way to go before we can consider it in the same light as doc.

With that in mind, lets move on with the inspection:

Using Microsoft Word 2003 on Windows XP as my starting point, I produced a sample document based on one of its stock templates, with tables, graphics, headers & footers, some text formatting… oh yes, and a touch of WordArt (*shudder*) for good measure.

I began with the two simple word processing programs that come as a standard part of Windows and Mac OS X: WordPad and TextEdit respectively.  Since they’re only intended to be basic programs, I didn’t expect a lot from them to start with. Naturally, a lot of formatting was lost. TextEdit did manage to import the table and text, but I honestly expected more from WordPad - it only managed to import the table!

I moved onto Microsoft Works, which nowadays comes bundled with many home PCs. It strikes me as a kind of “poor man’s Office” - the type of program you’d be using because it’s there, and it can do the job, but really you’d be wishing you had Office instead.

In my test, it managed to bring across all the text frames, the title text, and one of the two graphics, with some hint of the original layout which you’ll only notice if you place it side by side with the original. Unfortunately, it missed the sidebar, the WordArt, header & footer, and it managed to split the table.

I downloaded the free Microsoft Word Viewer from Microsoft’s website. As a program written by Microsoft themselves for the sole purpose of opening Word files, I expected nothing less than 100% accuracy here. Sure enough, it passed with flying colours, showing the document exactly as it was made in the original.

Microsoft, in fact, has Viewer applications for Powerpoint and Excel, as well as Word. Some time ago on a separate occasion, I downloaded the Powerpoint Viewer for my wife, as she’d been receiving .ppt files from friends, but had no way to open them without Office - the Viewer was a perfect solution. Unfortunately, these Viewer apps aren’t cross-platform; they’re only available for Windows.

Mac OS X

On the Mac side of the fence, I moved on to Microsoft Word 2004, part of the Microsoft Office for Mac package. Microsoft themselves advertise this product as having seamless cross-platform compatibility - the same file can be opened in Mac or Windows. Thus I would have expected it to render pretty close to 100% accuracy, but surprisingly, when opening the test document, it actually stumbled at rendering the WordArt, which appeared at the back of everything else, instead of in front (see the screenshot). Apart from that, everything else appeared pretty much exactly as it did in the Windows version.

From there I went to Pages ’08 - a recent entry by Apple as part of their iWork ’08 suite of programs. Pages ’08 managed to bring just about everything across except the WordArt headline (which, I don’t miss anyway). Only minor tweaks were needed to margins and font sizes, but otherwise it came pretty close.

Small inaccuracies aside, I actually found a lot to like with Pages. It feels to me like it’s the kind of program Microsoft Word should be - written from the ground up with page layout in mind. This means that its design features are easy to use without feeling clunky, but it also still holds up well as a no-fuss word processor. Microsoft, are you taking notes?

I decided to give Google Docs a try, as it seems to be one of the main voices proclaiming the wave of the future - online applications. I have to confess I wasn’t sure what to expect, since it was my first foray into online apps. I wanted it to work, I really did. Unfortunately, as you can see, it made an absolute dog’s breakfast of the layout. Google Docs seems to rely a lot on dynamic HTML & JavaScript to achieve it’s layout tricks, so in all fairness, it was a lot to ask of it. The simple fact remains that Google Docs has still got a long way to go before it can ever be considered as a tool of choice for handling more complex documents.

Open Source

Moving into the open source realm, I started by trying out AbiWord. I would have loved for this one to work, but unfortunately it didn’t actually get much further than TextEdit did. If you compare the screenshots - you’ll find they turned out quite similar.

AbiWord no longer appears to be under active development - the most recent builds found on SourceForge.net date back to 2004-2005. Hence, it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better at handling Word documents any time soon… for these reasons, I can’t recommend AbiWord.

OpenOffice, on the other hand, came the closest of all third-party programs tested - both open source and commercial - to matching the original Word document. Rendering was pretty much spot-on, with only a bare minimum of tidying up required - it even rendered the WordArt pretty close to the original. As an open source program, it is an impressive achievement on the part of the programmers to get as close as they do. The program is still being tweaked & worked on, so it can only get better from here.

(For this test, I actually used NeoOffice, which is a Java implementation of the OpenOffice source code for Mac OS X. At this time of writing, OpenOffice for Mac is still rather clunky and requires the user unfriendly X11 windowing system to be installed).

By the end of this inspection I’m pretty much convinced that the only thing that can open Word documents with anywhere near 100% accuracy, is Word itself. Many of the word processors we covered here will be able to open your business memo’s, cover letters and next blockbuster novel with little or no hassle, but the moment you start introducing graphics and fancy stuff into the mix, that’s where you’ll run into problems. Somewhere along the way, you will lose some formatting or layout, and it then becomes a question of how much tidying up will you need to do to make it look more like the original.

Conclusion

So what can I recommend for the average reader who deals with Word documents?

If you have Microsoft Office for Windows or Mac, the solution is obvious - use Word. You’re pretty much guaranteed you’ll be able to open any Word document that comes along.

For everyone else, who either can’t afford Office or choose not to use it, I can recommend the following based on my inspections:

For Windows, if all you need to do is open, save and print, you should consider downloading Microsoft’s Word Viewer. Its ability to open & correctly render Word documents is the best of all solutions reviewed - and it’s free.

If you need to edit your documents, I would supplement the Viewer application with OpenOffice. Its feature set is comparable to Microsoft’s Office and its rendering of Word docs is excellent. It’s open source (read: free) so it is also great value for money.

For the Mac, I can recommend NeoOffice, - it is more comfortable to use for the average Mac person, since it conforms to Apple’s OS X user interface (Mac OpenOffice still uses the clunkier X11 interface) and it is based on the OpenOffice source code, so it’ll render those Word docs the same way as its cousin.

From my personal viewpoint, I can also recommend Apple’s Pages ’08. Even though it isn’t free, and its Word doc accuracy is not quite 100%, it is still such a pleasure to use. There’s a 30-day free trial available, so you can try it out and see if you agree.

For Linux or other Unix-based systems, OpenOffice is pretty much your only solution for accurate Word doc rendering. Not that you’ll be complaining really, as OpenOffice is good enough to serve you well in a Microsoft-free existence. It is continually being worked on and improved, so it will remain compatible for the foreseeable future.

Finally, to those of you who are using Word to create your documents; Not all word processors are created equally. If you’re making a particularly complex document and want it to be opened & viewed by people exactly as you intended, you may want to consider saving your document as a PDF instead. The PDF format keeps all your fonts, graphics & layouts intact. PDF files can be read by just about anybody around the world, regardless of what computer they’re using. The PDF format also has the additional advantage of being printer-friendly, which means you can take a PDF file to a professional print shop and their machinery will be able to handle it.

If you’re not sure how to make PDFs that anybody can open, check out our IMG archives for PDF-related articles, to see how you can create your own PDF files.

What works for you? What’s been your experience with cross-platform file-swapping? Drop us a line!