Bean is a small, simple word processor (or more precisely, a rich texteditor), with many niceties added to make writing convenient, efficientand comfortable. Bean is powered by the same text engine as Apple's TextEdit, but it adds live word count and the ability to adjust printedmargins. Lots of other features too. MS Word, OpenOffice,etc. try to be all things to all people. But sometimes you just want theright tool for the job. That is Bean's niche.
Bean is not a replacement for MS Word. It does not do footnotes orhierarchical styles. Further, it is only partially compatible with MSWord's .doc format.