Another review from our European editor, Chris.
When I first thought about Mellel II ($49 for the regular license) I had to stop and remember the last time that I didn’t use MS Word. I have used it since I can remember, and must have used pretty much every version since Windows 3.1. I remember using something called Display Write Assistant back in the late 80′s when I was doing my Masters. I recall never really understanding WordPerfect, and anytime I got a new PC that had MS Works installed I would immediately install MS Office/MS Word.
Even when I bought my first Mac, my PowerBook G4, I never stopped to think that I would do anything other than install Office 2004 For Mac. My point been that it would have to be a tremendous product that reversed the trend.
The promotional material claims; “Mellel is an advanced word processor for Mac OS X designed especially for scholars, creative and technical writers, and anyone seeking a feature-rich and reliable word processor.” Would this be too “powerful” for day to day use? Would it be too “complicated” to switch?
The first really great thing to say is that it is easy to import existing Word documents and work with them. The second really great thing is that it is just as easy to export a file to Word format. For me this was an important first step. Without this feature it was never going to work for me, and while it may seem obvious that it would transfer documents between Operating Systems, I had to check. You can import and export RTF and Plan Text as well.
I have used Mellel II for a couple of weeks now and I can’t say that I have missed Word at all, nor have I found any difficulties in using Mellel on a day to day basis. Mellel provide a great comparison chart between the various options that they compete against, and their web site has superb forums and support. In fact this is possibly the greatest individual benefit that I came across – they maintain the personalized experience and interaction that we Mac users love so much. Beyond the day to day tasks that most word processing applications handle easily, I struggled a little with Mellel, but this was primarily because it was really strange to me to be finding out how to do things that I had taken for granted for years.
When I purchased my Mac I made a pledge to try and create a “Microsoft Free” zone, and to date MS Office is the only application that I use, and that is only for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, or correction – now only for Excel and PowerPoint 
Now that you have Mellel replacing Word you should look at Mesa to replace Excel.
now that you have the suggestion for replacing Excel I suggest Keynote to get rid of powerpoint
Thanks – will take a look at both
i have to second that motion.
i no longer use powerpoint. give keynote a fair try and you will become a step closer to your ms freedom. not that i think it is by itself a clever goal, by itself. just use the best product, even if it comes from ms.
oh, and keynote is sold only with pages included. this is a good thing.
Do you find Mellel II competent to take on a task such as a ph.d. thesis, with footnotes, illustrations, indexes and all the other paraphernelia necessary? What about for collaborative writing, editing etc?
I’m asking because these are real-world needs for me…
Peter J. Pedersen
Peter
The answer is yes – much more so that Word in fact.
Oskar
Thanks – I will probably get round to looking at iWorks for Keynote
Thanks for the review and the last comment. I am looking at Mellel as an option for writing a doctoral dissertation in 2007. I currently use Word for Mac.
I’ve just done a couple of large business reports – one using Word and the other using Mellel. I found the experience of using Mellel a far more pleasant, and I felt more productive with it. Word crashed 3 times when copying and pasting from one Word document to another. I’ve used Word for years (primarily on a PC), but it often feels like your wrestling with Word to make it do what you want. I’m less experienced with Mellel (I’ve had it over a year, but not used it consistently), but the interface is cleaner and easier to use.
Switching to Mellel does take some effort initially, as I kept expecting to do things the way Word did them (like using a table, or setting font styles). But as the Mellel way becomes more familiar, I’ve found that I like it more.
I have any large report to write tomorrow, and the customer will expect it in Word format. I’m thinking of writing it in Mellel and exporting it to Word when I’m done.
Tim,
You forgot to mention Mellel’s most significant feature: it’s fully internationalized, massively multilingual.
Few OS X applications handle multiple languages (including right-to-left text) as elegantly — Pages and Keynote don’t and neither does Mesa (or Mariner).
My Mac is a Microsoft-free zone. I do all my word processing in Mellel. For spreadsheets, I use NeoOffice. (NeoOffice may be slow and ugly, but it handles right-to-left text very well.)
Janet
Thanks for pointing that out – you are right it did get missed out of the review. Don’t blame Tim though I wrote it
Way to go the Microsoft-free zone, although it loks like at least half the Mac world want to clutter their Mac’s up with MS stuff now
I just finished my Ph.D. thesis (300 pages + notes etc.) I did everything with Mellel, and it worked just fine except for the crossreferences and the index, but I heard those features will be added very soon.
I used BookEnds for the endnotes (quite ok too), I would recommend also the OmniGroup apps OmniOutliner for organising stuff + OmniWeb which is by far the best browser I have ever seen.
All these apps do have some weak points of course, but nothing to compare with MS apps.
I am now doing my Ph.D. diss in Mellel, and *my god*, what a joy it has been – fast, dependable, perfect integration with Bookends, the lot. In fact, fiddling around with my 250+ page thesis has cost me far less time than doing the same with my M.A. thesis a couple of years back in Word. A very, very impressive effort.