LibreOffice Writer

Horrid documentation, but its usually better than the software. Terms and names are inconsistent. Writer is marginally better than "Notes" Typical case - cross-references. It's a target (in the documentation). In the dialog, everything is a reference (targets and references to them). Try to edit or delete a target in the dialog. You can't. It's just fun to keep them around cluttering up your work space, right? I can't remember a single time when I decided to use help and got a clear answer or a dialog that was consistent with the terms found in the documentation. Writer has promise, because there are a few things it does better than word, but very few. I estimate 5-7 years before writer is actually functional - Version 10 or higher. This is clearly a management problem. The object in software development IS NOT to change version numbers - or to change development platforms. It's to produce products that actually work with consistent and accurate documentation, and if you are going to support version 5, fence it off so we don't waste our time on old crap trying to figure out which version fixed which bugs. And finally don't make the cure worse than the problem. I know it keeps people from submitting bugs, which makes reporting drop like a rock, but that's not actually the objective, is it? And finally the marketing hype. If you try to write a book with Writer you'll die of old age before you get it done. But there isn't much competition out there. Scrivenor is OK, Word is as bad as Writer. Nothing works well. Nothing is well documented. If they ever get Scrivenor 3 to work on Windows - after missing every deadline for 3 years, well you see the point.