Microsoft word....

[mattbiernat]

(while stubbornly avoiding Thunderbird).

Why have you been avoiding Thunderbird? Does it lack scheduling features that you require?

the nice thing about open office, firefox, opera, thunderbird and many other open source aplications is that many of them have been converted to portable versions. this means you don't need to install any files on your computer, you can move the aplication folder as many times as you want (similar to mac) and you can put it on a USB and run off the USB.

[truthiness]

and today, of course, http://docs.google.com makes things even easier... and portable.

[asiafish]

I'll stick to Word. ITs not perfect, but it works with the rest of the world without requiring me to waste time reformatting documents or ask others to.

[dorronto]

I agree...I'm an old WordPerfect guy and have been using Word reluctantly. I have OpenOffice 2.0 but I haven't installed it yet. Don't need any incompatibilty problems. Word is a lot of bloat, I don't use most of its functions, but it gets the job done. That's what counts.

[christopher_wolf]

Well, for most of my serious work, I use either Vim/LaTeX or FrameMaker; Word 2003 for quick things that have to be typed up and distributed quickly in a common format to non-technical parties. Word 2003 opens up in less than a second on my system, even with EndNote 9 and ChemOffice macros loading themselves onto it at startup, and has never crashed on me (oh praise heaven! )

The problem with Open Office for me is that it uses up way too many resources on a PC to, essentially, copy Word...except it still uses more resources; i.e. expect a modicum amount of instability and resource hogging. Putting it on a USB stick is good, but if you are that mobile and need to latch onto other, public computers to do moderately serios word processing, then you really are in serious need of a good, ultraportable laptop that can handle it. There won't always be a computer available for it and you can actually put any word processor I have seen thus far, perhaps with the exception of anything that needs direct access to a PDF printer/distiller, on a USB stick and have it run fine. Open Office is *far* better suited to Linux systems where there is no real alternative besides KOffice which is what OO is good at. Google's offerings are small enough to essentially disappear off the radar map of most people, even those who only have a casual need for a word processor.

By the time one needs to do some serious typesetting and manuscript/thesis production, a more advanced word processing system (like LaTeX+Vim or an IDE for it or FrameMaker) has to be used if professional documentation and layout is a must. It is *far* too easy, within the WYSIWYG format to create amazingly deformed documents no matter what file format is used. I am sure we have all seen those who fill an entire page with spaces and tabs and, when you try to edit it in a group meeting, the mere deletion of *one comma* will break the formatting of the entire document, make the figures pop back to the previous page while paragraphs shift into bizzare amorphic entities spanning some non-integer number of pages; woe betide the reader should any tables be included as they are literally rocks as far as formatting goes and are usually gravely misused. With WYSIWYM, it is very difficult or near impossible to do that so much so that it almost has to be done intentionally to make a badly set document.