🚀 go-pugleaf

A week ago I posted to the net asking for comparisons between Word 5.0 and 
Nisus. I got quite a fair number of responses. I want to thank everyone who took
the time (and effort!) to reply to my post. The information and advice has been
very helpful. This post contains all of the mail that I received relating to 
this topic in their entirety. For anyone who is interested in Nisus, I also 
suggest the 3-part review of Nisus in TidBITS. Once again, thank you for all the
replies.

By the way, as you may have noticed by the subject this is VERY long, so now's
the time to bail out if this isn't of keen interest to you.

Ciao,	Greg Hammel.

P.S. If anyone cares, it looks like I'll be getting Nisus. Just as soon as I
have a look at the demo.

-------------------------------------------

Greg,
  I've been using MS Word for 6 years and got Nisus last year.  It was love at
first sight!  Even with the changes in MS Word 5.0 (largely cosmetic), Nisus is 
still the best option.  It seems, in fact, to be a near superset of Word 5.0,
lacking only the grammar checker (which is a very subjective tool at best).
Nisus adds (the the Word 5.0 basics) better drawing tools within the 
application, better page layout capabilities, better file handling (and no
temp files laying around when you're done) as well as some thoughtful extras
like the ability to maintain a backup copy and even keep all of your backup
copies in a separate folder ( on another disk even).  We use this last feature
for maintaining backups on a networked drive.  For compatibility, Nisus reads
all MS Word formats, including the mail merge documents.  Nisus uses the 
true Macintosh interface and doesn't do funny tricks with it's menus like Word (which causes many Word/X incompatibilities). Best of all (for our
needs), Nisus is available in an excellent Japanese version (marketed as
SoloWriter).

   Microsoft has grabbed the business market by the balls with their suite of
applications and large market share, but for personal use, I would not
recommend Word.  Either Nisus (for the most features & power) or WriteNow
(VERY fast and compact with plenty of features).

--------------------------------------------------

if you can just hang on for a week or two my huge review of Nisus 
will begin appearing in TidBits (comp.sys.mac.digest) and all 
will be revealed.

matt

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Nisus goods:
- multiple undo (very addictive)
- superb search/replace (best I've seen)
- nice dictionary with very fast & unobtrusive "suggest"
- macros -- not great implementation but quite usable
- nice handling of graphics, e.g. irregular wrap around them;
  dunno if Word 5 does this yet, Word 4 didn't

Nisus bads:
- stupid selection of paragraphs (too easy to screw up formatting
  of paragraphs when cut/paste elsewhere)
- poor implementation of styles; at least it HAS character styles,
  but paragraph styles are much worse than Word's
- file must fit into memory
- no equations
- no tables
- so-so import of Word files (may be fixed with Claris XTND compatibility
  which was recently added, at least I got mail from Paragon about this)

-- Russell

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Hi Greg,

I purchased Nisus in the fall, after using Word for 5 years. Before I get any
further, let me mention that Nisus is available directly from Paragon for $99
if you are eligible for an educational discount. All I had to do was send in
a photocopy of my grad student ID eith my payment. If you need their address/
phone number, just email me back.

First some good stuff: Nisus is fantastic! It has a text and a draw layer, which
is pretty handy for quick graphics, flowcharts or just boxing some text. Sort of
a mini page layout program. It supports color and more styles than you could
possibly need. There is also a macro language which can be very usefull. I
dislike bulky extensions like QuicKeys, so I prefer to automate some tasks with
built-in macro languages. You can get updates and all kinds of macro sets by ftp
to weber.ucsd.edu; I recently obtained some C programmers macros which are very
useful. Nisus includes dictionnary AND thesaurus, and you can purchase several
other dictionnaries from them: different languages (I got the french one as an
extra) and specialties (medical, legal, ...). There is a catalog function which
lets you do Finder level operatons much like Disktop. You can select a range of
files for opening, deletion, moving to another directory and so on. I enjoy the
batch operations that the catalog allows very much. You can bind any command key
to any command. Since I had been using Word for so long, I was able to do some
familiar customization... Well, there are so many good things I don't know where
to stop. Oh! one last thing: the documention is first class, MUCH better than
Word's.

Now the bad stuff: The worst thing for me is that it can open Word 3 and 4 files,
but not if they were fast-saved, a very common occurence with files you get from
others. Also, Nisus is RAM-based which speeds it up, but also means you must give
it a lot of memory for large documents; however, I'm writting my Ph.D. thesis
with it and haven't run into major problems yet. The document can always be
broken down into chapters. Also Nisus doesn't have a table creation tool. I
prefer to generate my tables in a spreadsheet and paste them into my document,
but it can be a hasle for small tables. Nisus does have a vertical selection
tool however, so tab-delimited columns can be manipulated easily. Since it can
do so much, the performance tends to be somewhat reduced under System 7, but
Word 5 suffers the same problem.

Well I have to get back to work, but if you have any more soecific Q's, just
email.

Adios, Bertrand Limoges
Sobeco Ernst & Young Inc., Montreal (Quebec)

----------------------------------------------

Something else you might want to consider is Write Now!, which was just
released as version 3.0 by T/Maker...  It's the only WP in any GUI that
has Paragraph and Character based style-sheets (which is important to
_me_ anyway :-)...  The only other one I've ever seen is Word 5.0 for
DOS, which blows.

Personally, Microsoft's attitude is bad.  Given the two you list above, I'd
take Nisus without even blinking.  There are enough people that swear by it
on the 'net that I'm positive it has as good a feature set, if not better...
Write Now! claims to have the largest dictionary/thesaurus though!  Good
thing, my spelling stinks...

-- 
----------================= _   /\ =================================----------
Chris Herborth              \`o.0'             herborth@pinot.Waterloo.NCR.COM
Information Products Co-Op  =(___)=
NCR E&M Waterloo               U        Laura Palmer: "Bob"'s favourite snack. 

------------------------------------------------

Just My Opinion:  MS Word 4.0 vs. Nisus 

Microsoft Word 4.0, Microsoft, $245 mail order, about $120 educational.
Nisus 3.041 Paragon Concepts, $245 mail order, $99 educational.

[This is a slightly updated version of a review I wrote in December
1990.  Note that the comparison is between Nisus 3.041 (now up to
3.06) and Word 4.0 (just upgraded to 5.0).]

Features matter, and both these word processors are loaded with them.
Both have spell checking, footnotes, indexing, automatic renumbering,
color, etc.  So what are the differences?

Of the two, only MS Word has:

  *  Tables--a vast improvement over using tabs, especially when table
       entries may be more than a single line long.
  *  An integrated outliner--very useful for organizing your thoughts.
       (Nisus has macros for outlining; less convenient, I think.)
  *  "Hot links" (automatically updated entries) to other Microsoft
       software, such as Excel.
  *  Built-in email reading/sending.
  *  Equation editing.

Of the two, only Nisus has:

  *  REALLY powerful Find/Replace commands (like 'grep' but menu-driven).
       [Word 5.0 is better than 4.0, but Nisus is still way better.]
  *  Automatic checkpointing.
  *  Powerful macro language, with named macros.  But they're slow.
       (MS Word uses an add-on macro maker.)
  *  Built in drawing capabilities (just basic B&W, though).
  *  The ability to read/write the other's formatted documents.
       (Word reads Nisus documents as text-only; Nisus can't read
        Word's "fast save" files.)
  *  All commands are on the menus.  No kidding--even your macros.
  *  Some (limited) hypertext capabilities.
  *  Formatting code doesn't interfere with compiling it (data fork is
       text only), so you can make programs look nice.
  *  (Nearly) unlimited Undo, not just the previous one step.

Word has "style sheets", whereas Nisus has user-defined character and
paragraph styles.  Similar functionality, but different approaches.

So much for the facts; what follows is just my opinion.

If you need to do heavy-duty word processing, chances are you already
have MS Word.  I've had it since version 1.00.  I've even written
several chapters of a book with it.  But I've never mastered it.

Those folks at Microsoft make a powerful, stable product.  Too bad
they never really understood user interfaces.  The original Word was
so hard to learn that in Word 3 they provided "long" menus for
heavy-duty users and "short" menus for the rest of us; but they left
the wrong things out of the short menus.  Now in Word 4 they've given
up trying, and made the menus user-configurable.  [I've heard they've
redone the menus again in 5.0.]

Microsoft aims at "power users"--those folks who prefer learning a
hundred magic keystrokes to touching their mouse.  So I've used the
manuals a LOT.  And when I find the command I need, chances are it
behaves not quite as I expected.  If you use Word all day, every day,
no problem--but stop using it for a week or two, and you discover
you've forgotten how to do things.

There's a trade-off between power and simplicity.  The more features
you add, the more complicated a program gets.  MS Word is powerful, so
I used to think much of the complexity was defensible.  Nisus is
powerful, too--amazingly so--but what amazes me most is the truly
inspired interface.  It's still complex, yes, but the interface brings
it under control.  I can already do more with Nisus than I can with
Word, and I have only a demo disk--virtually no docs, a few tiny help
files, but mostly what I can figure out myself.  [This was written
before I bought Nisus--the real documentation is quite good.]

Nisus' menus are long and hierarchical, but very well organized.  Some
menu items change when you press a modifier key, for example "Sort
paragraph" changes to "Sort + spaces", "ASCII sort", and "ASCII +
spaces".  Unfortunately I can't really say what it is that makes this
interface so good--it's too subjective.  But everything is right there
in the menus, and frequently in the first place I look for it.  [I
find I like Nisus' character and paragraph styles much better than
Word's style sheets, but this is again very subjective.]

If you're a power user, Nisus also gives key assignments for
everything, defined and redefined more easily than in Word.  You can
also very easily generate a list of the current key assignments.

One thing that hasn't come through clearly in the above paragraphs is
the Wow!  Look at that! feel of playing with a Nisus demo for the
first time.  Paragon bills Nisus as "The Amazing Word Processor";
well, I'm amazed.  And these are usable features, not gimmicks.  For
instance: triple-clicking selects the current sentence; you have ten
fully-editable clipboards; you can auto-indent; "Get info" displays
many statistics, even reading level; you can put in bookmarks and jump
to them; there are about a dozen extra type styles, including
Invisible; the Zap Gremlins command is great for cleaning up downloads
with funny characters; includes Sort commands; etc.  I'm still
enjoying my first color Mac, so I used the Find/Replace command to
make every word following the word "the" red.  (Worked first time.)

Word includes an outliner--but, like so many other things, I've never
mastered it.  Nisus has macros for outlining, which isn't much better.
When I want to make an outline, I use MindWrite, which is more
powerful (I think) than Word's outliner, and certainly a lot more
intuitive--too bad it's unsupported.

I don't use Word's equation editor, but from what I've heard, if you
do equations in papers you should get MathType anyway.  Both Word and
Nisus can inport MathType equations; Nisus can place them properly,
and so can Word if you have a widely available INIT to help it.  [Word
5.0 now includes MathType, probably done the same way 4.0 included
WordFinder. MathType is far superior to bizarre mark-up codes they had
earlier.]

MS Word is arguably more powerful than Nisus, and, if you can once
master it, there's really very little reason to change.  And everybody
else uses Word, so it's more compatible.  Conversely, Nisus features a
vastly superior interface, no arcane commands to memorize, and it's
just more fun to use.  Now, why does this whole comparison sound so
familiar...?

Bottom line:

I would recommend Word if:
  -  you need the features Word has and Nisus lacks.
  -  you need to be compatible with other people who use Word.
  -  you have already mastered Word.

I would recommend Nisus if:
  -  you need the features Nisus has and Word lacks.
  -  you don't need 100% compatibility with Word.
  -  you still haven't mastered Word, and despair of ever doing so.
  -  you think computers should be fun and make your work easier.

You can ftp a demo copy of Nisus from mac.archive.umich.edu (the file
is /mac/etc/demo/nisusdemo3.06.cpt.hqx), or call Paragon concepts.
Even if you don't buy the program, the demo is a lot of fun to play
with.  Don't do it if you can't afford to switch over, though, because
you may end up with a bad case of Nisus envy.  That's what happened to
me.  I sold Word and bought Nisus.

      ---------------------------- Notes added 22 Nov 91:

Nisus keeps everything in memory, which makes it faster than Word, but
I've found some documents Nisus can't handle.  Mostly this is when I
need to edit large .hqx files after downloading them.  If you deal
with very long documents, or have minimum memory, this may be a
problem for you.  (You can use the Finder's Get Info command to give
Nisus more memory, if you have it to spare; I haven't tried Nisus with
virtual memory.)

I've heard EndNote doesn't work with Nisus.

Microsoft software is notorious for breaking on every new computer and
every time Apple upgrades the operating system.  If you don't upgrade
to Word 5.0 now (for $129), what will you do when System 7.1 comes
out?  Both 4.0 and 5.0 will probably break (if they don't, they will
on 7.2), but if you upgrade to 5.0 you can probably get a cheap fix
from Microsoft.  If you stay with Word 4.0, you may be stuck with the
current Mac OS forever.

Paragon Concepts is better in this regard, but not perfect.  Nisus was
upgraded from 3.05 to 3.06 to make it System 7 compatible; the updater
is publicly available.  I have no idea what they fixed; as far as I
could tell, 3.05 worked fine.  They now offer an add-on package for
Nisus that supports System 7 features, but they sell it.  Some of the
new capabilities (like adding sound to documents) probably justify the
cost, but Balloon Help should IMHO *not* be optional at extra cost.  I
do not have this package (I even forget the name) and can't comment on
it beyond what I've already said.

Also:  If you get the educational version of Nisus, it's the real
thing in every respect:  documentation, upgrades, etc.  I think with
Word you get less documentation.

        ----------------------------

Disclaimer:  I have no connection with Microsoft other than as a
long-time Word user.  I have no connection with Paragon Concepts other
than trying out their demo disk, and having a last name similar to one
of their employees.  I do have an emotional interest in "the Macintosh
Way."

        ---------------------------- Notes added 7 Mar 92:

Nisus cannot incorporate PostScript figures into its documents; Word 4
can (though it took some work to find out how!).  This matters if,
like me, you need to incorporate Sun screen dumps, or any other
figures available only as PostScript files, into your documents.

BTW, I think the Nisus demo is now available at sumex also.

-----------------------------------

Hello Greg,

I've owned MS Word since version 1.  I bought it because I needed a word
processor with more power than MacWrite, but not for daily--or even weekly--
use.  Though I had kept up with every major upgrade, I was never comfortable
using Word.  Each time I had a paper or letter to write, there was
invariably some unexpected quirk to deal with.  Usually, that one special
feature I needed this time required digging through the poorly-written
documentation.  Usually the solution to my problem involved some exotic
Command-key sequence or a deeply buried dialog box.  When I needed to use
that feature a couple months later, I'd have to go through the whole
learning process again, because Word's user interface just never made much
sense to me.  It's not logical.

Well, finally Word 5.0 came out--with its controversial upgrade price.
Since this price was greater than the academic price of Nisus, I naturally
considered switching.  After reading all that I could on the net (as you've
been doing!) I decided to wait and see for myself when my office mate
received HER Word upgrade.  Meanwhile, I ordered a copy of the Nisus demo
disk direct from Paragon Concepts, Inc.

I was VERY impressed.  Nisus 3.06 was clearly superior to Word 4 in terms of
feature comparison, but I was more impressed by the thoughtful and elegant
ways in which these were implemented.  The demo did not include the ~600
pages of well-written documentation that comes with the complete version.
Despite this, I was easily able to figure things out--AND REMEMBER THEM--
with the help of the demo's on-line tutorial.

When my office mate received her Word 5, I was able to see that it has a
very similar number features to Nisus'.  She uses Word every working day,
and is very adept at it, so was able to show me many of its intricacies.  I
must admit, she showed me features I didn't know were present in Word 4 all
this time!  Then I asked myself, "Why haven't I learned these techniques
after all these years of using Word?"  The answer, of course, is that Word's
poor design is only suitable for those who use it very frequently and who
are willing to memorize many unrelated details.

As you can guess, I purchased Nisus.  I've only had the complete version a
few weeks, so I still have a lot to learn about it.  The unique features of
Nisus which figured in my decision were:

     -	It's the only word processor which produces files consisting of
	text in the data fork and formatting in the resource fork.  This
	means that every Nisus file is a text file, readable by practically
	any other application.  I'm a programmer dealing mostly with text
	files on a variety of machines, so I can easily do most of my
	writing, including some programming, in Nisus.  This means that I
	will end up using Nisus more than I ever used Word, so I'll learn
	it much more thoroughly.  I understand that Nisus may be thought of
	as a superset of Paragon's acclaimed text editor, QUED/M.

     -	Its unlimited-undo capability.  This is a very underrated feature!
	Nearly everything is undo-able, to virtually unlimited depth.
	When I first read about it, I thought, "Oh, that's nice.  Yawn."
	But after using it, I'm amazed at how much less frustrating things
	become.  You're not afraid to try something new; you can learn
	features and techniques much easier because you can always go back,
	and it always works as expected.

     -	It has a wonderful Find/Replace capability.  You can search and
	replace on regular expressions as in Unix.  But it's much easier
	to use since it has a menu-driven front-end instead of all those
	obscure grep symbols.  (You can still enter the symbols, if you
	like.)  It's actually a great way to learn about regular
	expressions.  You can also search and replace formatting, replacing,
	say, all capitalized boldface words with their uncapitalized,
	italicized equivalents.

     -	It has a very powerful macro language.  You can record a macro by
	performing the series of actions, or by using its programming
	language, or a combination of the two.

     -	It has a very big and easy-to-use spelling dictionary and thesaurus,
	which includes definitions.

     -	The Layout window is very clear and easy to use.  It is continually
	updated as you type in a document window.  (Word's Page View
	is a dialog box--ichk!)

     -	You can "Place Page...".  This is like inserting a graphic in your
	document, except that you insert another Nisus document.  This
	not only gives you much of the capability of a page-layout program,
	but the inserted page may be kept updated automatically, as in
	Publish/Subscribe.  (Nisus XS, coming out soon, will support
	Publish/Subscribe.)

     -	Its near-seamless integration of MacDraw-like graphics tools.

     -	It does formatting and styles very nicely.  Say you want to copy
	the format of a paragraph to use it further down in the document.
	Just select the little ruler icon to the left of the paragraph,
	copy it, paste it where you want the new paragraph, and start
	typing.  Word, on the other hand, gives no indication where there
	is a format change from one paragraph to another, and to copy a
	format requires defining a named style!

Now, I don't mean to assert that Nisus is perfect.  What software is?  I can
think of a few features it lacks.  You can do much with the macro language,
but Nisus could still use built-in tables and outlining, for example.  If
the experience of earlier Nisus users on the net is any guide, however,
Paragon Concepts has been very good about providing significant, frequent,
and free updates to Nisus.  I don't remember a single update to Word since
the 4.0 release years ago!  Furthermore, Nisus is already on version 3.06.
It must be a more mature product than Word 5, which was a complete rewrite,
I believe.  Microsoft products have a reputation for breaking when new Mac
system software is released.  (Something to do with their custom compilers
producing self-modifying code to save space, or something like that.)

In conclusion, Nisus appears to have been built by just a few creative
people who have a clear vision of what a word processor should be.  And they
have evidently permitted their vision to evolve while receiving feedback
from users.  Word?  It gives every appearance of having been thrown together
by a committee with a more complex agenda!

You can download the Nisus Demo via anonymous ftp from mac.archive.umich.edu
as /mac/etc/demo/nisusdemo3.06.cpt.hqx .  Or you can get it free from
Paragon by calling: (800) 922-2993 or (619) 481-1477, by Fax: (619) 481-
6154, or via email on AppleLink: D0405 or Internet:
d0405@applelink.apple.com .

I hope this helps, as other NETter's submissions helped me to make the right
decision!  Just returning the favor!

	Tyler Perkins			perkins@spot.Colorado.EDU

P.S.  I, of course, have absolutely no affiliation with Paragon Concepts or
its employees, other than having purchased and enjoyed Nisus.

------------------------------------------

Greg,

I am a Nisus user in a sea of Microsoft Word. We at the Computer Center at the
Univ. of Utah support a number of labs as well as many users here on campus.
Microsoft Word has been the primary word processor as far as the campus is
concerned.  We are now considering a change in our recommendation for the
campus at large, mainly because of the cost of upgrade on Word as well as the
monstrous size and difficulty of upgrade.  I believe that Word will still be
the WP of choice for those already using it and for those who specifically
like the features that Word provides.  We are considering recommending an
integrated package such as Claris Works for the students in general, because 
of its ease of use and flexibility.

I use Nisus mainly because I used QUED (the predecessor of Nisus) as a text
editor for programming for a number of years.  Nisus gives me the advantage of
sophisticated search and replace in opened and unopened files.  They
have done a pretty good job of enhancing Nisus to the point that it is almost
as good as Word in many of the power features. My main complaint about Nisus
(I am not a power word processer user, so I do not comment about those features)
is that it is somewhat slow in starting up (it is quite responsive once it is
going), and another hangup is that it insists on keeping the entire document in
memory.  I set up a 2meg slot for Nisus and rarely have a problem. However, if
I bring in a fairly large document (around 1meg) I will run into memory problems
in simple things like global replaces.
Nisus does have a nice macro facility and anything, including macros, can be
attached to a command key combination. Nisus also uses stationery, has a nice
graphics layer, and seems to work well with System 7.

I hope this helps.

Joseph F. Buchanan
Computer Center - MEB 3440
University of Utah
Salt Lake City,  UT  84112
AppleLink: A91  Internet: joseph@cc.utah.edu

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