Apple Question (gmail, Office, installation, processor)

[stillkit]

I have a new Mac Mini and need a good word processor.

The Apple store has 17 different ones I can download, but I don't know much about any of them or how they might fit my needs. I just want a word processor. Nothing fancy. I won't need the ability to create graphs and charts, add bullet points or pictures. Just something I can use to write short stories, something which has the usual font and style features.

Anybody here have a Mac and a word processor? Any advice or suggestions?

There's always Microsoft Office.

Or Pages, which is made by Apple.
Or LibreOffice, which is free.

I've heard good things about Mellel, but haven't used it very much, and I'm not sure how much it can do.

[archineer]

Write room is really nice. Extremely minimal but allows you to just focus on writing. Pages and word are the standard on the mac though.

[tpk-nyc]

If you have to share documents you'll want an industry standard application like Word or Pages.

[stillkit]

Thanks everyone. I'll check out your recommendations.

[macroy]

If you need something to just create documents, and your Mac mini has internet access - also try google apps or Microsoft Office Web Apps. Both require no installation on your computer, and both are free.

MS office Web Apps is a fully functional MS Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote) that is cloud based - you may not have all the advanced features, but based on your OP, that won't matter. You also get 25GB of storage free with it (Skydrive). Google's is integrated with many of their other services, so if you're already using gmail or google+, you already have it. Since these are cloud services, you can access your files/documents from anywhere.

[Macrina]

TextEdit Mac 101: TextEdit is very simple to use and versatile.

[Barking Spider]

I use Pages.

[dkf747]

I've been using Pages. I like it, but it can be frustrating for me at times. We now have MS Word and I'm liking it much better than Pages.

[plwhit]

Originally Posted by stillkit

I have a new Mac Mini and need a good word processor.

The Apple store has 17 different ones I can download, but I don't know much about any of them or how they might fit my needs. I just want a word processor. Nothing fancy. I won't need the ability to create graphs and charts, add bullet points or pictures. Just something I can use to write short stories, something which has the usual font and style features.

Anybody here have a Mac and a word processor? Any advice or suggestions?

Why not get LibreOffice or OpenOffice?