When it comes to word processing on the Mac, Microsoft Word has
long been the standard. There have always been other applications
available, but many people have never bothered to check around,
instead just going with Word, assuming it will be the most
compatible of the various applications available.
And that's probably true.
Ever since Word 97 for Windows and Word 98 for Mac, Microsoft
Word versions have shared a common format. This really makes it
easy to share documents with other people or use documents on two
computers that have different versions of Word installed.
This was a great improvement over previous versions of Word,
which only allowed you to open documents created in the same
version of the application or import one from a previous version.
If you had a Word 6 document and wanted to open it in Word 5, you
would have to export it using Word 6, saving it so that it would be
compatible with Word 5.
Forgot to do that? Then it won't open properly.
It gets worse. If you open a Word 5 document in Word 6 and save
it, it will ask you if you want to update it to Word 6 format. If
you're not paying attention and click yes, you won't be able to use
it in Word 5 again unless you export if using 6. It's the same for
Word 5 and 6 documents being opened in Word 98, 2001, or
v. X.
Then there's AppleWorks, although it suffers from the same
issues that plagued Word 5 and 6. The only good point here is that
AppleWorks 6 has been out for so long, that very few people are
likely to be using 5 or before anymore. But if you do run into
someone still using version 5, they won't be able to open a
document you created in version 6.
If Apple does decide to update it again (it's been something
like four years since version 6.0 came out), I hope they don't
alter the format. Many people who share documents with other 6.0
users would have trouble dealing with the inconvenience. Schools
that use 6.0 school-wide wouldn't be able to upgrade to the new
version in, say, just the computer labs, because if the old version
didn't open the new documents, productivity would be at a minimum.
Many schools just can't afford to upgrade the software on all of
their computers at once (although some are forced to if they buy a
site-license).
Of course, the worst-case application was Symantec GreatWorks, a
sort of ClarisWorks-style application that Apple provided with some
Performas in the early 90s. GreatWorks could open it's own
documents - and nothing else. It was so incompatible that it's no
wonder it wasn't around for very long, being replaced by
ClarisWorks as the word processor of choice in Apple's Performa
software bundle.
More recently things have been getting more compatible. Perhaps
the model application would be the ThinkFree Office suite. Unlike
AppleWorks or old versions of Word, ThinkFree Office's format is
fully compatible with Microsoft Office 97 format, the format that
the majority of the world is using.
People have said standards like this can be a bad thing, because
they can reduce competition, but this proves that wrong. ThinkFree
Office provides competition to Microsoft Office (although most
people don't even know about it) and still retains the
compatibility that is so necessary these days.
In the age where emailing documents is common, application
formats need to be consistent. As nice as it is to have a variety
of applications to choose from for word processing (and I've heard
an experimental version of AbiWord is to be released
for OS X), the formats shouldn't be incompatible.
