Losing my MS Mojo just a little bit more

Despite my well know dislike of Microsoft Operating systems, strategies and most Microsoft products, there are a few that I am traditionally quite fond of.

Microsoft Excel has always been the best spreadsheet around - it's even slightly more warm and fuzzy due to the fact that it's roots are in Exel Macintosh v1.0 (which one of my friends at TramTown has in a still-shrink-wrapped box).

Microsoft Word has also been one of my long time favourite Microsoft applications. Many large documents have been effectively managed since Macintosh MS Word 4 (which was in around 1990 I think). I even didn't mind Word 6 on DOS. Macintosh Word 5 was a real winner because I could use the equation editor instead of the old school ./ equation commands in earlier versions (who else remembers those?!)

I don't write too many documents in word any more. I'm either composing text in Emacs or laying out complex pages in various Adobe products. On the odd occasions that I do myself, or help my wife, I am disgusted by how hard it is to do things that had such good user interface in Mac version 5. Mac version 5 was the high point. Subsequent to that, Microsoft merged their Mac and windows Office code base and released code that ran on their own virtual pcode machine. Needless to say, most of the inspiration came from the Windows Office, even though it was way behind in features and useability.

I do need to deal with Word documents though, and I don't like Open Office. Open Office is like the worst parts of MS Office without the good parts.

I was therefore very happy to discover that there is a MacOS native version of Abiword. ( http://www.abiword.com/ ). It's user interface reminds me a lot of Mac Word 5 - simple menus, clear (and large) toolbars with only genuinely commonly used tools. Some modern conveniences like inline spell checking is also welcome. I do still miss the customisable menus of Word 5, and non-typeable style and font drop-downs are a sore point. It doesn't support Applescript, but it does have it's own plugin api and some form of scripting support. According to top, it's using about 30 Mb of ram. A lot more than Word 5 (which used about 2Mb from memory), but not bad for a modern app.

So - what MS Applications do you have a soft spot for, and are they as good as they used to be or better? If you're weening off them, what do you use instead?

Please, be my guests and comment away!