What’s the Word . . . . . . . . Processor?
Don’t judge me, but it turns out I am a Word Processor Freak (WPF).
I did a quick survey of my various devices and this is what I have, in alphabetical order:
- Atlantis Word Processor (PC)
- Bean (Mac)
- Daedalus (iOS only)
- Libre Office (any OS)
- Open Office (any OS)
- Pages (Mac)
- Scrivener (Mac or PC)
- Ulysses (Mac, iOS) (Try it out for Mac during NaNoWriMo )
- Word – Office 365 (Mac, iOS, PC)
- WordPerfect (PC)
For many authors these days, the ability to export content to an eBook is pretty important, so where it’s relevant, I mention it. I’ll also mention that with my writing, I want shortcuts for tasks, voice interactivity, easy editing, and portability to sharable formats and across devices. The program should not crash or perform badly with very large documents, which most novels tend to be, and it needs not to exceed my (low) tolerance for reading instructions.
This isn’t intended to be an in depth review of all these applications, but if you don’t like Word there are options out there from free to less than $50.00. And, believe it or not, I have some praise for Word.
Atlantis Word Processor
- $35.00.
- Full-featured 30-day trial.
Most of my familiarity with this application comes from its ability to do an extremely good export to ePub. There’s a plug-in for it, and from what I’ve seen it’s just about the best, cleanest export I’ve seen. I’ve seen what Jutoh (a Word document conversion application) does under the hood for ePub, and there’s no comparison. Atlantis is superior. Jutoh and Atlantis are about the same price, so based on output alone, Atlantis would be my choice.
I poked around some to see if I might want to write in this application via the Windows virtual machines I run on my Macs. The answer was, not quite. But this is a great, lightweight application that does a lot. If you’re on a PC, check it out.
Bean
Not in active development so (lifts hands). I did try to write in it but it wasn’t what I need for my WPF disorder. You can still download it.
Daedalus
- $0.99 in the app store.
This is iOS only, that is, iPhone and iPad only.
I really wanted to like this more than I did. There’s a lot to love here, but it failed me on the portability fork of the test. There’s something of a learning curve with the way it uses gestures and stacking of documents/pages. I don’t have much time for a learning curve. It’s still on my devices because I can totally see using this for small form writing or emergencies. Export to pdf or ePub was pretty easy, too.
My main issue was that it struck me as geared for shorter material, not the sort of long form writing, versioning, and editing required for a novel. Without a seamless way to integrate with a desktop machine and back, I don’t see this as a go-to professional writing application.
Libre Office
- Free
I’m a curmudgeon. Libre Office was too much like my nemesis, Word. However, and this is key, it opened a large Word document with no problem. This means it passes the portability test. So, this could well be a great option for the budget minded or people who are wary of Microsoft’s push to the cloud.
Open Office
- Free
My experience with this application goes back several years when I attempted to avoid using Word ever. At that time, Open Office billed itself as an amazing tool for a professional writer. That might have been true, but only if the professional writer’s document wasn’t a novel. Because Open Office choked on a 90,000 word document. My experiment ended quickly. Maybe it’s better now. I don’t know.
Pages
- $19.99
I’m a quitter. As soon as I spend five minutes trying to figure out how to do something that should be easy, I quit. I can’t figure out anything in Pages and it’s as pushy and overbearing as Word. So.
Scrivener
- $44.99
For many writers, this is a go-to program. For me, it’s not. I’m sorry. Personally, any application that needs How-To books and weeks long courses is an application that is too complicated for me. Obviously there are legions who disagree. I confess to liking a lot of the features.
See: Quitter, supra.
Ulysses
- $44.99
I just recently, as in a couple of days ago, got this program. It has an iOS app AND a desktop version. I’m looking forward to trying this out.
Right now, they’re running a “Try for Mac during NaNoWriMo” option, so if you’re nanoing, maybe check it out.
Word
Word – Office 365 and desktop versions.
- $$$$
Word has versions for iOS and Mac OS, so this wins on the portability fork. I’ve edited in Word on my iPad with a document in Dropbox and picked up on the desktop and laptop, so, despite what I’m about to say, that is a huge, huge convenience. It works seamlessly across Mac and PC versions.
Word is my nemesis. I despise it. I hate that Word thinks it knows how I should write and how I should format what I write. It doesn’t. It’s wrong. I use it because I have to. But, it’s convenient to have, and (AM I REALLY SAYING THIS???) it could be worse. I know it could be worse because, in fact, Word used to be even worse.
WordPerfect
- $179.00 (Full version. Currently on sale)
This is the program I do most of my writing in. It does a great export to xml and it’s better than Word. It allows me to format the way I want and need to format. It’s the reason I run Windows virtual machines on my Macs. The current version is X7. I hear that version X8 will feature direct integration with Dragon Naturally Speaking, which I’m looking forward to and will immediately buy.
I hadn’t heard of Ulysses before today. I’m a Scrivener user but I’m getting very impatient with their eternal promise of an iOS version that never happens. So I’d appreciate a review of Ulysses after you’ve played with it a bit.
The idea of built-in dictation intrigues me. I haven’t tried it in any app, really don’t want to get Dragon Dictate, but still want to try dictating. So if you’re into that, I’d love to hear about it too. I’ve listened/read Monica Leonelle but she hasn’t convinced me I want to pop for Dragon + an expensive mic + the time investment. What do you think?
OpenOffice and LibreOffice are essentially the same thing, especially if you are thinking of a version a few years back. The same base code, a split in the community, and then some differences after several years of development – but in a way most people won’t notice. The LibreOffice is the default one to use days, but I’d expect more or less the same things from both.
http://www.howtogeek.com/187663/openoffice-vs.-libreoffice-whats-the-difference-and-which-should-you-use/?PageSpeed=noscript
I thought I was the last living user of WordPerfect. Love it, love it, love it. I use Word when necessary for using Track Changes during the editing process, but all my drafts are in WP.
I too resent Word’s insistence on formatting things when I don’t ask it to, and I couldn’t live without WordPerfect’s Reveal Codes option. When I’ve got a document in Word (received from someone else for use in a blog I manage for a nonprofit), and Word keeps overriding my attempts to change the formatting until it would otherwise be necessary to retype the thing from scratch, instead I’m able to open it in WPerfect and find the formatting code and delete it.
Yes, I’m a fanatic. Glad to know I’m not alone in loving WordPerfect.
Interesting review. Tried several but not all of these. Used WordPerfect for years and loved it. Sadly my work environment switched to Word which I still curse regularly. WordPerfect is very writer friendly and to me that makes it a superior product.
@Jane Steen: I am already doing dictation. Mac OS natively has dictation and it’s pretty good. I’ve dictated on my Mac using my iPhone earbuds. I’ve used the iPhone earbuds to dictate to Dragon for Mac too. No problem, so an expensive mic isn’t necessary. Windows also has dictation and it too isn’t horrible. Also, Mac dictation works across the Windows VM. Not without a couple of hiccups but it does.
Dragon for Mac also works across the VM. I do have an expensive mic, purchased in a moment of boundless optimism for another reason, and I like it too. But the iPhone headphones work too so, there you go.
The training doesn’t take long so I wouldn’t worry about that.
@Elizabeth: Yeah, I know. But I still have Open Office on the computer so …
@Gin: Yes! A thousand times yes.
@Gin: Hopefully this won’t double post.
Yes. A thousand times YES!
I love WordPerfect. It gets out of my way.
I will always fly the WordPerfect flag and can still tell you what every function key in WP5.1 did. An early version of WP for Windows had an export to PDF feature long before Word even thought to do so.
That Bill Gates stole a march on other companies and bundled his computers with the dreck that is MS Word is something I would go back in time to correct (in a world that wasn’t reeling from so many more horrific events).
@IAMJSON: You just saved me from the temptation of buying an expensive mic, then. I’ll have to look into dictation. Thanks!
I just recently started using Ulysses because of the NANOWRIMO program and ended up buying it for desktop and iPad both. It’s really great, especially after I customized my own colors and layout. It’s fully customizable. You really get whatever you put into it. The consistency with the iCloud syncing is one of its best features, in my opinion. I’ve been using it a month heavily without any issues.
I even used it for a business conference, to take notes on the courses I was in, and the difference between Ulysses and my standard note taking program was magical. This is mostly due to customizing the layout beforehand. On a whim, I decided to take notes for the conference in it and it ended up being invaluable.
I have used pretty much all of the above programs except WordPerfect. I don’t have Parallels on either of my OSX machines and my PC is maintained by my business so I use Word and Google Docs for that one. Your post on it intrigues me but I’m not forking over $180, plus the cost of Parallels, to test it out. :)
@Suzanne: Oh, thank you for the information about Ulysses. Now I’m really looking forward to trying it out!
Agreed, if you’re on MacOS, the cost of a Windows OS plus software is a bit steep if all you want to do is try out a program.
Dear heavens, do I love WordPerfect. Indeed, I love the entire Corel suite — Presentations is about ten thousand times superior to Publisher, for example. It’s especially nice for portability within programs — I can easily re-size a single page WP document to a quarter sheet flier or 12 page poster or animated slide show with a couple of keystrokes.
Unfortunately, the Big Multi-Function Copier/Printer at work seems to be programmed to accept only MS Office documents. I can print, sorta, from Corel suite, but the graphics and formatting get slightly borked, and there’s no way to fix them through Preview.
@Jane Steen:
I thought they recently released Scrivener for iPad?
@Lia: They haven’t released it yet. They said in 2015 (after saying in 2014 iirc) but here we are in November and I still don’t see it. :\ I still use Scrivener for a few things but the long delay in iPad adoption is why I’ve switched over to Ulysses, which is brilliant for switching between iPad and laptop and desktop, all synced through iCloud.
I would prefer Dropbox sync (I’ve found it to be more reliable in general with multiple apps) but it hasn’t failed me yet so maybe it’s just a matter of the people designing the software more than the reliability of iCloud or Dropbox themselves.
Now I just need to hold out for the Soulmen (creators of Ulysses) to release an Apple Watch app for Ulysses. I don’t even know, man. But I want it. Maybe a dictation functionality that syncs with all the rest? I would buy that. I would be all Dick Tracy and talk my whole book into my watch, at least the first draft. How Jetsons would that be?
@Suzanne: Come to think of it, I could use it for writing DA reviews. Reading a historical romance, don’t want to switch apps from Kindle to Ulysses but want to get some notes down about my FEELS regarding the hero. Mutter into watch. It syncs to my desktop where I find it later, all these notes to build into a semi-coherent review. There, we have a legit use case besides my wanting to be Dick Tracy or a Jetson. Except I don’t know what’s MORE legit than wanting to be a Jetson.
Count me in as another one who loved WP 5.1 and I was totally upset when the organization I worked for went with Word. Part of my job was correcting drafts written by other staff and that became almost impossible without the reveal codes option in WP 5.1. More than once I had to retype the whole document because it was impossible to find the error(s) in Word.
My dh used Word at his work so guess what I ended up with at home? I still regularly curse Word when I have to do anything in it and thank my lucky stars that I’m retired and don’t have to deal with it on a daily basis!
I used to say they’d get my WordPerfect when they pried it from my cold, dead processor. However, I was assimilated by the Word collective when my editor said all manuscripts needed to be submitted and edited in Word.
I could live with Word, but I really, really miss Reveal Codes from WP. It was the best.
I’m with you regarding Scrivener. I know people think it’s the bee’s knees, but I don’t want to spend all that time in a learning curve, I just want to write.
I miss WP. I will always miss WP. I dislike Word so much that although I bought it for my staff because they were accustomed to using it I continued to use WP myself (and much time went up in smoke as we converted and re-converted docs depending on who was doing the work).
Add me to the love WP crowd. I’m another one who was forced onto Word for business reasons. (And Excel from Lotus 1-2-3, which is a whole ‘nother discussion… Excel STILL doesn’t have calendar functions that Lotus had 20 years ago.) Reveal Codes was a life-saver more than once. It was always enabled. I still have my copy of WP 5.1 on 5.25 floppies – a whole stack of them. Along with all the third-party True Type fonts that I bought separately. I was a real font-glutton back in the day.
@lor: If you have that problem again, I suggest changing the font (in Word) to DPCustom Mono2 (a free font). The document will look weird, but misspellings really stand out, and when you are done, you can control-A and change the font to something nicer. I’ve used WP5.1, then we moved to Word 2 and I’m currently still using Word 2007. The first thing I do with any new version of Word is change the tool bar to what I prefer, turn off or on certain things, and begin building my own autocorrect library. I take charge and as much as I can make it do what I want it to. I find the bad thing about Word to be that its programmers think users don’t use this or that feature — and change it for the worse or get rid of it altogether. I miss Autotext and a lot of other features that if present are well hidden or named such that a search (using duckduckgo) for the unknown new name of the feature is difficult. But the main thing I’ve learned about computers is never apologize if one beeps at you.