Yeah, the issue is not "the space between the chair and the keyboard" -cute though.
I installed my Word 08 normally etc. and it had all of these weird defaults- like instead of Times New Roman it's "Cambria" and whenever you press enter to go to a new line it spaces it about 1.5 though it's not shown in the format as 1.5- hence my reason for starting this thread. I'm running intel it's painfully slow to start up on 2 gigs of ram with a 2.4ghz processor- it's word for crying out loud. Not Maya or Avid. On top of that its default saving is a .docx which if you're sending it to someone who doesn't have word 08 they will have trouble opening it.
Also- WHY CAN'T YOU JUST SAVE AS A .PDF? Why can't they just add that in the "save as..." drop-down menu??
If only Apple created Word...
That's because the setting isn't 1.5 spacing. If you do a little searching on this forum, inside Word's settings, or the internet in general, you will find that the setting causing the spacing issue is the point spacing after a line in paragraph formatting. That and all your other default format issues can easily be solved by saving the normal.dotm file with the settings you want.
As for how you save your document, as Zoolook said, you can set it to always save as the previous office format and it will always save that way by default. Also,
you can save a file as a PDF, just not through the "save as" option. Instead, hit "print". When the print window comes up, go down to the lower left where it says PDF. hit that and you get an option to "save as PDF". Easy!!
As for the load time, I just don't see it as a big issue, or even a huge difference between Word and some other programs. For example, I timed Word to load and it took about 22 seconds. Then I timed opening iTunes, which took 19 seconds. Not a huge difference to me. Of course other programs, like Safari, take much less time, but all programs are different. Honestly, I think people get very unnecessarily anal about load times. Is your time so valuable that a few seconds of your day is that significant? I would imagine not since you have time to spend chatting/complaining on forums like this.
As for your very last statement, it's not like apple didn't create a word processor, but it's just not as good as Word. If you want to use Apple's word processor, go out and buy it.