An imponderable, word-crunching edition

[truepenny]

At the moment, I have three word processors on my computer: MS Word 2000, WordPerfect 12, and Open Office 3.0. As you (may) know, oh interweb-Bob, I loathe Word with a white-hot passion. So why, you ask, do I have it on my system?

An excellent question, interweb-Bob! I'm so glad you asked.

Originally, I only had WP. I've used WP for years and years; I like it in direct correlation to the degree with which it differs from Word. (This means, of course, because WP has been handed through a succession of increasingly stupid companies, that I have liked it less and less, but that's a different problem.) But I am also well aware that it is going the way of the dodo as Microsoft eats more and more of the software market, and if I want other people to be able to read my files--and that's more and more how things work these days--I need to be thinking forward about cross-platform compatibility and what I do when WP finally turns up its little toes and dies.

But I hate Word and Microsoft and their little dog, too. So Open Office looked like it might be a good solution. I've been using OO for a couple months, and it's . . . meh. It does not irritate me to screaming point the way Word does, because it makes fewer assumptions about what I want, but it's a Word clone, so I dislike it for all the reasons I dislike Word.

And then there was this weekend's snafu, in which OO decided that an .rtf file (of the draft of the new wolf book) it had opened and saved happily the night before was now unopenable. (Word, when I installed it, concurred. WP opened it without complaint, but of course lost all the Track Changes formatting which is kind of essential to the whole collaboration process. This required kind of a lot of work on my part to remake the file, and I was Not Happy about it.)

Which leads me to my imponderable. If I can't use OO to go back and forth with an .rtf file, is there any reason to use it at all? Am I not going to be happier--since I don't like OO anymore than I like Word--using WP for my own files and Word for my collaborations? Except then that whole WP-in-decline thing is still an issue, and I don't know what the hell to do.

Yes, this is the sort of thing writers think about when we should be working.

Comments

[clhollandwriter]

I've hit a similar problem, as I got a laptop that came with Vista pre-installed which won't run any version of Word earlier than 2007 without being full of bugs. Since I'm not paying out good money for a word processor I hate when there are free ones, I started using Rough Draft. It's quite basic, but seems to have all I need.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, since what I object to most about Word (and hence OO) is all the NON-basic features that it assumes OF COURSE I want, maybe I should look at Rough Draft.

[sister-bluebird.livejournal.com]

I adore Rough Draft, for what it's worth. It's actually built for writers.

[clhollandwriter]

It does look a little bit like Word, and I've only just got it and haven't figured out how to work the formatting yet, so apologies if it turns out to be totally not what you're looking for. :)

The writers' forum I'm a member of has a wiki, where we've collected some links to alternatives to Word. The list is here if you're interested: http://wiki.libertyhallwriters.org/doku.php?id=resources:software:word_processing

[britmandelo.livejournal.com]

That's very odd. My Vista laptop had 2007 and I downgraded it with no discernible issues. Been running strong for at least three years now.

I use Word because I always have used Word. It annoys me to death, but it's what I'm Used To Using, and so any change just makes it seem like the world is ending. (Yes, I'm aware of how bizarre that is.)

[clhollandwriter]

It's Vista...

I hate Word 2007 for the same reason - it's not what I'm used to because they've changed what was a perfectly good WP and added bells and whistles.

[1crowdedhour.livejournal.com]

I've never tried Google Docs, but I have friends who collaborate via files shared that way.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

We've done that. But GoogleDocs has its own set of problems and loathsomenesses, and it did something unspeakable to one of coffeeem's files--so I'm very leery of it.

[1trackmind.livejournal.com]

GoogleDocs has seemed a lot more stable of late. It used to crash pretty frequently but I haven't had a problem with it in a few months. That said, I'd definitely download the file every time you save it for just in case. I'm sure I don't have to tell you backups are a very good thing.

I haven't tried Google Gears but theoretically that lets you do some work offline with Google things, including GoogleDocs.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

It makes a dog's breakfast of formatting and it cannot handle anything larger than about 20,000 words.

We do use it for a bunch of stuff, but writing complete novels in it is more pain than it's worth.

[shana.livejournal.com]

I bought Lotus Smart Suite for my father, so that he could use Lotus Word Pro again.

Now he can get into his old documents again.

[teriegarrison.livejournal.com]

Did you know that you can turn nearly everything automatic off? (Not that I'm defending Word; as a tech writer with than more than 20 years' experience, all I can say is it drives me nuts, too, though probably for very different reasons.)

I hate to make assumptions about what people do and don't know, but just in case you don't know this, select Tools > Options, and poke around in there to see what you can turn off. For example, one of the things that drives me the nuts-est is how it doesn't let you select just part of a word. On the Edit tab, you can shut that off by unchecking the 'When selecting, automatically select entire word' checkbox. Review each setting on each tab, and you'll probably find a lot to customise. Close when finished.

Then, select Tools > AutoCorrect Options. Again, poke around and turn off the settings that bug you. Here's an important tidbit: anything you change on the AutoFormat as You Type tab need to be changed on the AutoFormat tab, too, or your results won't be uniform.

Oh, one last thing. You might make a note of your preferred settings once you get everything the way you like it so you can repeat it on another machince in future.

If there's anything else I can try to help you with, I'd be happy to try. I've been fighting with and sort of conquering Word for decades now, and I'm not half bad at it. :-D

I hope this helps. If you already knew it, I hope you won't think me presumptuous.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, I do appreciate it.

As it happens, I'm well aware that I can turn off the automatic "helpful" features. (I have to do it for WP, too, since in recent versions they've taken to imitating Word.) But I would certainly have wanted that information if I didn't have it!

[teriegarrison.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay. At any rate, maybe the info will help someone else. I'm shortly going to write up instructions for how to make Word do chapter breaks so you can have different headers in each chapter. I'll probably post them to my site, and if you haven't yet mastered that technique (took me YEARS to figure it all out--it's so deeply DEEPLY wonky), I can post a link in your blog. :-)

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

I would like to know how to do that too, thank you.

[(Anonymous)]

I despise word, too. I'm glad to hear there are other people in the world who agree with me.
If you have an Apple computer, have you heard of Scrivener?

[allochthon.livejournal.com]

I loff scrivener with all the loff, but I'll probably have to move off macs in the not-so-near future, so I've been eying other writing software.

The Scrivener site (http://www.literatureandlatte.com) has a list of writers' software for windows, too: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/links.html

I too use OOo, and it drives me nuts. I think AbiWord (http://www.abisource.com/download/) exists for Windows, and it's a very light wordprocessor.

I've also heard good things about Darkroom (http://they.misled.us/dark-room, I think, but I'm not positive that's the official download page). Another very lightweight word-processor that blacks out the rest of the screen to keep distractions down.

[loligo.livejournal.com]

You're not alone! This is an actual quote from an email I sent to my husband just yesterday, when he asked what I thought of OpenOffice: "In general, I don't love it passionately, but then I don't love MS Word, either. I haven't loved a word processing program since WordPerfect back in the early '90's."

I don't know what to do about it, either.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I have no advice -- but I will use WordPerfect until they put out the last version and turn off the lights, and then I'll probably keep using it for about five years afterward. I will not use Word to compose unless no other option of any kind exists.

[technomom]

I use Word now, and have for years - but I've never found anything else I liked as much as WP 5.1. I have frequently wished that I'd kept my install discs for that version (of course, that would also mean keeping a 5.25" floppy drive working). I used Word in its DOS days, too, but only under duress at a job that wouldn't consider using anything else.

I stopped bothering to update WP as it got too much like Word, and all the employers I worked for required the use of Word, anyway. :-(

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Ah. Yes. Another WP 5.1 fan!

I dearly loved that you could access your C:/ directory from it and do any editing needed without playing around with DOS.

And Reveal Codes is so very much what I love.

That said, Word has taken to crashing anything I've written originally in WP when it autoupdates, which drives me nuts. I do turn it off, but...

Open Office took a WP rtf document and presented me with a document that was portrait layout on one page, landscape on the next, alternating all the way through and driving me nuts.

[grave-tidings.livejournal.com]

I kept my WP 5.1, I'll probably be buried with it. I also discovered you can simply copy the files to a directory, load the program on an XP computer by using DOSBOX, and off you go. Pfft! to Microsoft.

[kelliem.livejournal.com]

You do know that you can save WP docs in a .doc or .rtf format to send them to other people, right? I do it all the time. (Like swan_tower I will stop using WP when they pry it from my cold, dead hands. ;D )

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, and sometimes weird things happen to the formatting when you do that. Or, at least, sometimes weird things happen to the formatting when I do that.

[kelliem.livejournal.com]

Haven't had that experience myself, but it may because I rarely use any unusual formatting.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I used WP, until Microsoft bought shares in it and suddenly, mysteriously it wasn't available for Linux any more...

These days I use TextMaker (http://www.softmaker.com/english/of_en.htm) - I suppose you'd call it a Word clone, but there are uniform versions across all platforms, it's cheap and rock-solid and phenomenally fast (when I switched from Word, I ran a comparison: it took Word thirty seconds to load and run a book length document; it took TextMaker a second and a half), it reads and writes in any format, tracks changes into and out of Word docs... I love it. I've written half a dozen books with it now, and never lost a day's work.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Good to know. Thanks!

[miladyinsanity.livejournal.com]

I actually like MS Word. Mostly because of Track Changes. I love Track Changes enough that I plan to stop sending out my WIP to more than one CP at a time to maximise its abilities.

(Whether it also maximises my utility because I'd have to wait for people to get back to me I don't yet know, but as always, I am experimenting.)

I have used OO, and generally have it installed, but I can't say I love it. Mostly because it seems to corrupt my files periodically.

I used WP a couple of years ago, but didn't like it enough to switch either.

I really want to try Scrivener, but until/unless I can afford 2 laptops, it's out of the question because econometric/statistics software doesn't usually work on Mac.

[slweippert.livejournal.com]

I was complaining about word to a techie friend of mine who told me about Open Office, so I tried it. Except, I had the worst experience with it. I had told it to save every few minutes, like I do with any word processing program, but when I came back to work on that story later the file was gone. I mean completely, totally, non-searchable gone. I was so angry I removed Open Office that same day.
I think I might try some of the other programs mentioned here, though, because Word still annoys me.

[grave-tidings.livejournal.com]

You might take a look at Liquid Story Binder.

Also...I am still working with a DOS version of WordPerfect, so you are not alone in loathing Word and trying to find something, anything that gets out of your way like the old WordPerfect.

I save drafts in RTF, use Google Docs and flash drives for collaboration with my writing partner (but she's only four blocks away) to keep track of the drafts, and only worry about formatting the final draft.

I swear by Liquid Story Binder because it's for the PC, and because it pulls everything together for each project.

[slithytove.livejournal.com]

I compose in a text editor and transfer to OO for clean-up, but sadly, I have found that although OO reads .rtf just fine, it always mangles files when it tries to save them as .rtf. I have to save a file as .doc, then load into Word 98 (which I run under Wine), and save an .rtf from there. That's all I use my ancient version of Word for. Saving .rtf files. *eyeroll*

I've tried AbiWord, and although it's fine for short mss., a book-length ms. will bring it to its knees. It also mangles .rtf saves. What's up with .rtf anyway? It's an ancient format, its bugs and gotchas should be long gone, every implementation should be perfect.

Someday when I have time, I'll write a python script to convert text to plain vanilla .rtf. But I haven't yet.

[grass-angel.livejournal.com]

I usually just FORCE OpenOffice to work for me. Sometimes it involves more effort than just not using the 'Open' dialogue like restarting or sometimes even updating to the newest version.
As such I have no real advice except to keep trying. (And I hope you eventually do happen upon a successful option so you can continue to avoid Word as much as you can.) *doesn't like Word either*

[adventine.livejournal.com]

Well, if you hate Microsoft, I'd recommend switching to Mac. They also have their own word processor (Pages that comes with iWork), you can also install a Mac version of Word so that everybody else can open your files.

Also, because of the comments on this post, I've tried Scrivener. I love it. I think I just offered it my soul.

[lanerobins.livejournal.com]

I'm that horrible person who actually likes Word. I will however say it's probably because it's what I know, and what lets me get to the writing the fastest. I tried scrivener, which many many of my friends adore, but found it wildly incompatible with my brain. I just made it cry. I use open office at work and it sends me into shrieking fury a lot. It seems to be worse (in my opinion) at assuming it knows really what you meant to do than Word. Word tends to make assumptions, but I can go back and adjust it and it says, oh okay. Open office will doggedly make the same adjustment over and over and over again. Most recently it decided one of my rtf mss should have numbered paragraphs, and occasionally alphabetized ones. No matter how often I told it otherwise, it persisted until I finally just gave up.

Writing is hard enough as it is; all I want out of a word processor is that it's quick to start up, stays out of my way, and is compatible with my agent/publisher.

I'm intrigued by some of the other programs listed, but I'll probably just stick with the horrible but well-known.

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

Admittedly, I've just been...resigned to MS Word

Tried OO, hated it like a cat hates being wet. Tried AbiWord, gave me an eye twitch. I might try Scrivener, but if that doesn't work out I'll just resign myself to MS Word 2003-my computer can't handle Word 2007, which from what I've heard might not necessarily be a bad thing...>.>