Software for Writers

[aceplace57]

I'm looking for something better than Ms Word for writing.

I've heard good things about Scrivener. It lets you storyboard, outline and organize a writing project. Sadly, it's only for Macs.

Anyone tried PageFour? It has similar features as Scrivener and it's PC friendly.

I've heard the Pros use Final Draft. Is that only for script writing? How about novels?

Anyway, what are you using? Clearly Ms Word is too limited for anything but short stories. Trying to scroll around in a 400 page novel would be a nightmare.

[Erika]

Well it's not too bad if you create an index at the beginning of your novel in Word. You can then just click on one of the chapters and it'll bump you there.

[aceplace57]

I was heartbroken when Windows 95 broke Word Perfect. Word Perfect was the gold standard at our University in the early 1990's. All the administrative and faculty offices used it. I was in Computing Services providing pc support for the campus. We migrated to Win 95 and Word Perfect started aborting. It was a huge mess. We tried patching Word Perfect. Still got the Blue Screen of Death. Finally we had to convert all the campus PC's to Ms Word. It took us over a month to get all the pc's switched.

That little disaster ruined Word Perfect reputation. Ms Word has been king of the PC ever since. Too this day I still prefer Word Perfect. I wrote all my papers in college in Word Perfect. You had complete control of the document. You could always turn on Reveal Codes and delete any formatting.

After 10 years, I still occasionally screw up a document in Word. Sometimes the only way to fix a formatting problem is to close the document, throw away changes, and start over. It doesn't happen often, but it sure ruins my day when it does.

I haven't tried using Word Perfect in almost 8 years. They never got it completely stable in Win 98 or XP. But, it was a fantastic word processor under Win 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups.

Anyway, like everyone else I'll be using Word. Even the specialized writing software creates files easily read by Word. Their main benefit is organizing the writing project.

[rossbondreturns]

Final Draft and Celtx for screenwriting.

Word or Open Office for Novels

[terrasj]

You hadn't tried Corel's release of Word Perfect? Used to be my favorite word processor durring my highschool years. Back in the day, I also used Corel Draw suite for all my essays and projects. Even though that was over 10yrs ago, Corel draw suite has a place in my heart and is still my illustration application.

As for word processing today, i'm with Ross on this one - OpenOffice is a great suite. Its Excel speadsheet and other apps in the package are good too. It also has publish to PDF, so with its pricetag of $0.00 , its unbelievably affordable.

Best yet is OpenOffice is available for almost every platform out there. And its pretty stable on Windows.

I never liked MS Word, and probably never will.