Product ReviewsOffice software
Serious alternatives to Microsoft Word just keep getting better. First came the excellent Nisus Writer Pro, but now an even more polished version of rival multilingual word processor Mellel has arrived. At first glance, Mellel might not look much of a threat to Word. Its default chunky brushed metal toolbar looks anachronistic and presents a practical problem too - there's no way to reduce its size, which may be awkward for those with smaller screens. But don't be fooled by appearance. Mellel offers performance and features that when it comes to technical papers or long documents, surpass those of Word. Mellel 2.5 is an academic's dream. As well as an ability to link to bibliography management software, at the click of a toolbar button a built-in outliner displays the document's structure (its headings and so on) in a pane to the left of the document window. This is obviously a handy way to navigate a document, but it's also a practical way to re-organise content - just click on the arrow buttons at the bottom of the pane to adjust the structure's hierarchy. In Mellel 2.5, long document support is significantly improved in two ways. First off, you can embed bookmarks in documents, which, like headings appear in the document's Outline. Second, is the most important new feature - the introduction of cross-referencing, which allows you to link to parts of the document that update as the document changes. Cross-referencing works logically - you can create a reference that can point to a target, such as a bookmark or image, in another section of the document. But what sets it apart from Word's broadly comparable tool is that you can also link to what Mellel calls virtual targets - those sections or chapters that you haven't written
Once you've chosen the target, you can fully define the reference to it through a flexible mix of plain text and variables, such as page number or range, which update as the target moves. Variables are one of Mellel's strong points. Its Auto-titles feature - like Word's Bullets and Numbering feature on steroids - lets you build a hierarchy of headings, captions and so on, based on a defined flow structure. You can organise and edit title flow attributes in a dialog box. In Mellel 2.5, you can now format the auto-title extensively, setting how it will appear when used in different parts of the document, such as the table of contents or cross reference. While Mellel is a versatile text-editing applications, its power isn't directed at prosaic business uses. For example, you won't find a mail merge feature here and, unlike Nisus and Word, it isn't scriptable. And while it has no problem producing complex tables, it can't flow text around images in the same way you can in Word. But for many Word users, performance is a more important feature and here, Mellel proved a champ. It was much faster to launch than Word and even scrolling through long documents didn't slow it down. Perhaps unfairly, word processors are inevitably judged on how compatible they are with Word. On this measure, Mellel is capable. It exports in Word format, as well as plain text, OPML and RTF, and although it saves in its own file format, this is based on the open XML standard. But Mellel didn't make as good a job of translating Word documents as its more expensive rival Nisus Writer Pro. It couldn't open or import a file saved in Word's new .docx format, and while it translated the text well from a standard Word .doc file, embedded images were lost in the process. Its failure to fully understand Word's complicated tracked changes or comments features hardly sets it apart, but for many that's enough to prevent switching. Mellel 2.5 isn't going to replace Word in business environments, but it's clearly better value. And if you work with long, technical documents, Mellel is something approaching a must-have. By Tom Gorham |
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