Contents Generation

Pros Shares excellent word-processing feature set with less expensive companion product, Nisus Writer Express; hass advanced document-production features including indexing and table of contents generation and support for editorial comments; powerful yet easy mail-merge capability; excellent integrated support for Sonny Software's Bookends software.

Limited support for .docx file format; no direct integration with Excel; doesn't support actual change-tracking the way Word does; lacks some of Microsoft Word's other recherché features like support for legal table of citations.

For ordinary writing, Nisus Writer Pro and Nisus Writer Express are equally capable. Both have excellent writing environments with a variety of ways to view your writing. My favorite has always been full-screen view, which removes menus and buttons from the screen and leaves me alone with my thoughts; but there is a WYSIWYG page view and window-width draft view, if you prefer.

Full Story: Nisus Writer Pro 1.4 - Macworld

This post is going to dive into some things web workers should consider in a mixed Microsoft Office/web office environment, and in environments where multiple web office suites are used.

In my recent post, commenter Ray Stahl brought up the 80/20 rule, which says that 80 percent of an organization’s employees will have their needs met by a web office suite, while 20 percent of the employees (the “power users”) need full Microsoft Office licenses. Microsoft itself believes that this hybrid approach is likely to work in the future, with the desktop Office suite and its own Office Web Apps coexisting quite happily (although as Tom Reestman points out over on our subscription research site GigaOM Pro, its approach may actually be good for its web office competitors ).

While each company’s needs will vary, the 80/20 rule seems like a reasonable rule of thumb. Microsoft Office licenses can be expensive, so only providing full Microsoft Office licenses to power users like technical writers and the accounting staff makes sense.

Full Story: Web Office Suites: Complementary and Coopetive Technologies - WebWorkerDaily (blog)