Doing it without MS Office

MS Office is a great tool, there is no denial to the fact. However, I think it's very easy to live without it. And save a lot of Money.

After moving to macintosh the first good enough reason to stop using office products is availability of TextEdit. TextEdit is the basic text editor shipped with Mac. It is not only is capable of opening word files but it's amazingly easy to use.

However, for a very advance use like writing product manuals for a moment I thought I need the advance TOC management and other advance word features. So I started looking at the open-source world for a tool that can help me achieve this. It didn't take too long for me to find one. And after having a peek into what it offers, I really thought MS Word sucks. I had discovered LyX.

What is LyX?
LyX is a document preparation system. It excels at letting you create complex technical and scientific articles with mathematics, cross-references, bibliographies, indices, etc. It is very good at documents of any length in which the usual processing abilities are required: automatic sectioning and pagination, spellchecking, and so forth.

It's free, open source, supports postscript and PDF format. It's developed in QT which means it's available for most platforms including Windows, Linux and ofcourse Mac.

Our new product swf2exe studio for flash would be shipping user manuals written in LyX. Really, there are amazing products that beat ms word both in usability and features. I know it takes time to get out of the 'perceived ease of use' belief that's conveyed by demonstration effect.