Nisus Writer Express is also extremely flexible, allowing you to customize and rearrange most elements. You can add and remove icons from the Toolbar—or hide the Toolbar completely. In the Tooldrawer, you can use the Palette Library to add, remove and reorder your writing tools to your heart’s content. Plus, you can define your own keyboard shortcuts so you can access every menu item without opening a menu.

The word processor is also well organized in its layout and design. It presents editing and formatting controls in a toolbar across the top and a slide-out menu on the side of each document’s window instead of being buried under menus and submenus. At the bottom right corner of a page are small icons that provide quick access to endnotes and footnotes, style sheets, languages, clipboard and the magnification feature. And inserting foot and/or endnotes is as easy as selecting “Insert” and then “footnote/endnote” and typing or pasting text.

What’s more, Nisus Writer Express simplifies the use of style sheets. You can view and update your styles using the Style Sheet view. To edit a style, just switch to the Style Sheet view and choose the style you want. Then use palettes and menus to apply formatting as usual. Sample text that you can edit is shown for each style, which lets you immediately see how your style will look.

Version 2.7 adds features such as multikey keyboard shortcuts, full screen view (shown), leader tabs, an attribute dropper toolbar item and other fixes and enhancements.

The word processor can purportedly handle up to 180 different languages. I only use one (English) but if you need multi-language support in one document, you can mix and match them.

The creation of tables is also easier to use than in any other word processor I’ve tried. To add one, you just use the Insert Table toolbar item, choose the style and draw the table. You can then use the Tables palette group to edit table settings such as padding, borders and shading.

Nisus Writer Express has one of the best find and replace tools around. The PowerFind feature offers a streamlined way to describe patterns in your text without having to learn a programming language. Cleaning up formatting is also a breeze. “Info Tags” at the bottom of the document window offer visual information on the formatting applied to text. When you click on these tags, an options menu lets you change or remove the formatting. You can even select all the ranges in a document with the same formatting; this makes it easy and fast to apply changes to an entire document.

There are a few things that I wish were different in Nisus Writer Express. Nisus should include a grammar checker, at least (since some folks don’t like them) as an optional add-on. And maybe it’s just me, but the fact hat the magnification tool has 128 percent instead of 125 percent bothers me.

But, overall, Nisus Writer Express is fast, flexible and as friendly as the Mac itself.

Nisus Writer Express 2.7 costs US$69. Current Nisus Writer Express owners can upgrade for free. It requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later (Mac OS X 10.4 recommended) and is a Universal Binary app, so runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs.

Macsimum rating: 8 out of 10