The Essentials: My New Favorite Writing App

The Essentials is a reoccurring column where I talk about what we (Paul and I) use to write, work and honestly, survive the work week.
Writing. Paul and I do this a lot, in the tens of thousands of words a week, which is not a surprise considering that what we do for a living is to provide opinion and factual reporting on the world of Microsoft and beyond. But when it comes to the tools we use, we differ on what applications we use to create the content you read on a daily basis.

The obvious choice for writing is to use Word but if you are not paying for Office or simply feel that the app is too messy for your needs, there are plenty of alternatives; everything from simply using Notepad to using Markdown are all viable options. For the past six weeks or so, I have been looking for an alternative to Word that offers a simple and clean writing experience and happily, I have found an app that fits this needs.

Even better, it's also a UWP app as well. Appy Text, which I admit I don't love the name, is a simple writing tool that gets the basics right including spell check, minimal interface, a few different saving options (including continuous saving) tabs, and word count.

I have been using this app for about a week and it does everything that I need without any overhead. Specifically, copying the text into WordPress brings only the text and none of the markup with it which makes posting an easier process.

The other crucial thing about this app for me is that it will work with Windows 10 S. Yes, I know Office will soon be in the store but as of right now, it is not. And besides, I only need to write, I don't need 99.9% of the other functions of Word and this app fits the bill.

When using this app along with Grammarly, my writing tools have significantly changed during the past year. While you certainly need Office in the business world and for many other valid reasons (Excel and PowerPoint are still incredibly useful) for those that only need a simple writing tool, there's no reason to pay for Office.

If you want to check out the app, you can find it in the Windows Store here or there is a healthy discussion in our forums about the app as well.