Following My Own Advice: Writing Tools (Premium)

I have used Microsoft Word for decades for all the obvious reasons, but I have also experienced a series of escalating issues that make this app less than ideal. And as I do with all of the other apps and services I rely on, I've experimented with using other writing apps many times, and at one point I even took the radical step of replacing Word with the technical Markdown text editor I was using at the time to write my self-published books.

But nothing is perfect: The editor I had been using, MarkdownPad 2, was no longer supported or being updated, and it required me to install an out-of-date version of a third-party developer SDK as well. I dealt with this for a while, the idea being that using a single app for all of my writing, rather than two separate apps, one for the web articles (Word) and one for the books (MarkdownPad 2), made sense. But I eventually just started using Word again for my non-book writing. The path of least resistance.

I have a love-hate relationship with Microsoft Word, and I always have. For so many reasons. So let me just describe a few of them.

Decades ago, I realized that even as a professional writer, I was using only a small percentage of its features. I long hoped that Microsoft would fix this problem by offering a stripped-down UI that would expose only those features I regularly used by default. And there were several pushes in this direction, like the adaptive menus in Office 2000, the ability to hide the Office ribbon that debuted in Office 2007, the simplified ribbon that debuted in 2018 but only came to Word for the web, and then the personalized toolbar that Microsoft quietly added in 2022, supposedly as part of the Office visual refresh, but I think only in the Insider program. Whatever the details of that last, it's obvious I'm not the only person who has found Word and the rest of Office a bit too complex.

More to the point, none of these UI changes solved my problem: I don't see that personalized toolbar in Word today, for example, but even when I did, it would only appear after using Word for some unspecified amount of time, and it was never truly personalized anyway. Nor did it sync to my Microsoft account/Microsoft 365 account (which is another issue I'll get to below), and because I use so many different computers, I am always reconfiguring Word, which means that I wouldn't have that toolbar until I had used Word on whatever computer for whatever amount of time.

The lack of full and complete settings sync has long bothered me as well because I configure Word very specifically for my needs. Microsoft Office, like Windows, syncs some settings so that when you sign in to the suite and use the apps, some of the customizations I make auto-apply. But Office, like Windows, doesn't make it clear which settings it syncs, and whatever the percentage it does sync is small. And so I go through a very specific process of customizing Word every single time I set it up on a new PC. Which, as...