After all these years and Word still can't kern worth a darn. Would love to throw away LaTeX for something easier to use, but Word is not it. Excel is special if you need it, PowerPoint is almost as good as Keynote now. Visio seems like it hasn't been updated in 10 years; OmniGraffle is so much better.

Different strokes for different folks. Visio is the one piece of software I miss from Windows. I hate OmniGraffle as its boolean operations are pathetic and it seems to think it knows where to put stuff instead of where you put it. Visio also has so many more shapes.

Using Visio is like stepping back to 1999. They could have at least updated the renderer, added better magnets and auto positioning... It's bizarre looking at a old-style renderer bolted onto a metroish UI in 2013. What are their designers thinking?

Visio was the best diagramming tool in 1999, it's still popular in the enterprise, biz types love it; omnigraffle is more for designers, engineers who use macs, different markets to be sure.

The content is more important than the presentation for most users.

Visio is a piece of shit I will say.

I prefer Pages to Word, and my requirements are far more extreme than most people's. Pages even seamlessly handles Word's change tracking (i.e. you can load a Word doc with change tracking going, make changes, and they will flow back to Word or to other Pages users seamlessly). All this and Pages doesn't waste gobs of screen real estate on "ribbons" and other useless crap.

Word obviously supports Microsoft automation stuff that's unique to its own ecosystem, but aside from that and index generation, Pages is actually ahead of Word. (Not "light years", but heck it's a word-processor.)

I'm quite happy on 500+ page word documents here, tracked across 30 users on SharePoint. I was not happy with Pages a couple of years ago - it did a shitty job of import/export losing styles and even text sometimes.

Don't like Ribbons? Double click one of the groups and they go away http://officeblogs.net/UI/sizepics/RibbonCollapsed.png

And I don't know how you can complain about that when Pages is full of horrible trays...

Got to be said I like the ribbon, going back to LibreOffice on the home Linux box is like heading back to the last century.

That's because Libreoffice is basically a clone of Word.

Pages isn't "full of" trays. You can use them or not, and by default not.

For anything other than typing up a paper, I hate Word. It is awful with graphics and formatting is a pain in the ass. When it comes to working with images and text in Word, I almost feel like it would be easier (and less of a hassle) to hand code it in HTML with CSS and then print that instead of doing it in Word. The last few months have been torturous because my fiance and I have been using Word to create our wedding invitations. If that is light years ahead of the competition, I seriously think I need to write a word processor and profit!

You're using the hammer to put the screws in there. Use the tight tools for the right job.

Papers: LaTeX or Word with a proper template (you actually have to know a lot about how to use Word for such things to be effective.)

Wedding invitations: Publisher

Everything else: Word.

That makes sense. The problem is that since it is a one off thing the cost of Publisher ($139.99) would've offset the savings of making the invitations at home. But I will keep that in mind for the future.

Just snag the 30 day trial :-)