Distracted by software

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I'm on a Mac (I'm one of the Fervent Faithful) and have been using Microsoft Word forever. I use many of its bells and whistles: comments, hidden text, footnotes, styles. My relationship with Word is conflicted, however: I use Word 2004 because I find Word 2008 impossibly confusing. And lately, Word 2004 has been sluggish and — worse — buggy. Several times in a day it has crashed on me; I've lost work and had to retrace. This is a terrible problem!


So I've been looking into alternatives...