[Bubba]

ajaxWrite

This is pretty impressive and will prevent the need for many people to source a copy of MS Office.

But...it's a bit buggy at the moment, so don't expect to be able to use it reliably yet.

http://www.linspire.com/ajaxwrite.php

I think google will also be launching a similar online word processor soon, but not sure of the details.

[andy_e]

It does look very good- however it's fucking slow! it's been five minutes since I opened it and it still hasn't let me open anything, the "open" box times out!

[Bubba]

Yeah, it's actually buggy as hell, it's just quite an interesting idea...

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

I think google will also be launching a similar online word processor soon, but not sure of the details.

Google have just purchased Writely

[Bubba]

I checked back on this recently - it's much improved and runs at a decent speed now:

http://www.ajaxlaunch.com/ajaxwrite/

[Control freak]

These are all well and good but will any of them be compatible with Word2007? The format of their documents is completely different. Gone is the propriatary binary and say hello to XML - rather alot of it in fact. The new format is docx which is actually a zipped up collection of XML documents.

[Bubba]

I'm not sure that really matters - it's not meant to be a replacement for a fully fledged word processor, it's just something that's much more convenient for many users.

I don't actually like using Word very much - it's way too complicated for my needs and I'd rather use ajaxwrite. A Word power-user isn't going to be satisfied by something like this though.

I thought Office 2003 used XML already anyway? Presumably the number of formats supported will increase as time goes on. How many people are going to upgrade to Word 2007 as soon as it's released anyway?

[Control freak]

Office 2003 is still binary. Ive been usng Office 2007 for some time now and to be honest it is a fair bit easier than 2003 to use (I should be getting paid for this plug). Microsoft have spent most of there time trying to improve the usability of it rather than adding new features. When they were doing the research for the new release, over 80% of the new features which people were asking for were already available, its just people couldnt find them.

[slackline]

I've started using LaTeX for writing the documents and reports that I have to, bit of a steep learning curve, but very nice docs, especially for type-setting maths.  Won't ever take off with the masses though.

OpenOffice http://www.openoffice.org/ is a good alternative to M$-Office, or if you want something a bit lighter AbiWord is pretty good http://www.abisource.com/.