How I Write: Tools (Premium)

As you know, I am constantly evaluating and reevaluating the software tools that I use. This is especially true for writing.

Like most people, I have extensive Microsoft Word experience, and I used this application for many years. About 20 years, by my rough reckoning.

But unlike most people, I spent much of that time trying to replace Microsoft Word. Well, that's not completely fair. I wasn't "trying" to replace Word. But I was always looking at alternatives to determine whether I was using the best tool for my most crucial work.

In the early days, that meant WordPerfect, which was acquired by Corel in 1996. Back then, the firm was trying to wrest the word processing market back from Word, and it offered several innovative features---like real-time format changes as you moused-over choices in menus---that Word lacked. (Until, of course, Microsoft simply copied them.)

It also meant open source office productivity suites like OpenOffice and its many offspring, and AbiWord. These products were usually a few versions behind Microsoft Office from a functionality perspective. And several versions behind from a user experience perspective. But they did work, and they embraced open document formats. (Until, of course, Microsoft simply copied them.)

I'm not morally beholden to open source or "open" to any degree. And I don't feel that the Microsoft Word document formats, no matter how open you believe them to be, will ever be made inaccessible. They're too popular for that.

But Word is, in many ways, a mess. It is the end result of decades of steady improvements. And the number of commands that are now available in this application---whether in the old-fashioned menus and toolbars versions or in more recent ribbon incarnations---is almost uncountable.

I am a professional writer. I probably need less than 5 percent of the features that are available in Microsoft Word, and this has been true for years. That's why I figured, early on, that some open source word processor would do the trick. After all, I reasoned, literally 20 years ago, how could Microsoft fight back against products that provided the features that people expected but were free?

Well, Linux, OpenOffice, and their ilk never really did take off, regardless of my opinions. And I never felt comfortable using any of them, anyway. They just always seemed off. So, too, did some other options I tried, like Evernote and Microsoft OneNote.

But with the personal computing market switching to mobile and web app models, the word processing market has changed yet again. And in an interesting twist, it has simplified to more of a text processing mode, if you will, where the documents we create aren't just open, they're also basically plain text. That's about as open as it gets.

I wrote "we" there like we're all doing it. The truth is, in the Windows world, Word and the formats it uses still rule. But if you look past Windows, to the Mac and Chromebook, and, more import...

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