Word Processor That Acts Like Excel?

April 5, 2010 9:13 PM

Is there a word processor out there that acts a little bit like Excel? I'd love to have one document, but with separate "sub-documents", tabs, "worksheets". (The way an Excel spreadsheet can have multiple worksheets, accessed with a single click, and that can be added or deleted.) I'm using Windows Vista. Thank you.
posted by Savannah to computers & internet (14 answers total)

There are 'tabbed word processors' such as PolyEdit.
posted by lukemeister at 9:16 PM on April 5, 2010

Notepad++ is great, especially if you ever edit "techie" text files.
posted by Threeway Handshake at 9:23 PM on April 5, 2010 [2 favorites]

You might want to take a look at OneNote.
posted by stopgap at 9:32 PM on April 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

TextPad
posted by deezil at 9:38 PM on April 5, 2010

You might want to check out PageFour. PageFour has projects---they're basically worksheets---and tabs. I don't use it all the time, but it's come in handy in the past.
posted by eisenkr at 9:47 PM on April 5, 2010

I love OneNote (get the 2010 Beta)
posted by defcom1 at 9:50 PM on April 5, 2010

You want an outliner.

Keynote NF, specifically, has both tabs and nodes. (a tab is a file, a node is an area within that file).

MS Word also has outliner features.

Self pimpage: Comparison of Outliners.
posted by MesoFilter at 10:02 PM on April 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

Thank you for all the great suggestions!

I have OneNote, silly me, but haven't explored it. PageFour is looking like it's what I would like to play with. I am looking for something for my fiction writing. (I tend to have a document, with another associated document "worksheet" that goes with the main piece, where bits that have been edited out, ideas, notes, etc. go, and was looking for a way to organise this without having three or four Word documents that were all part of the same piece of fiction. If that made any sense.

I will be happily checking out all the other offerings as well. I appreciate all your responses.
posted by Savannah at 11:04 PM on April 5, 2010

If it's for fiction writing, you may want to look at Scrivener and Mariner Write as well.
posted by carnival of animals at 11:38 PM on April 5, 2010

carnival of animals: neither of those work in Windows Vista.
posted by koeselitz at 12:21 AM on April 6, 2010

Oops, sorry!
posted by carnival of animals at 12:33 AM on April 6, 2010

Anyone using emacs but somehow not yet using org-mode for this sort of thing, check out org-mode.
posted by wobh at 6:56 AM on April 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

Microsoft Word? With its Master document feature.
posted by TheRaven at 8:55 AM on April 6, 2010

I saw your question earlier and I was very intrigued by it, as it never occurred to me before that tabs would make the organizing of my notes MUCH easier, as opposed to storing multiple drafts of the same document into one folder

So I did a little investigating, and Wikipedia was very helpful in giving me a list of text e
I briefly skimmed through most of them and found that NoteTab Light works the best for what I want. But you should take a look at all of them here: Windows text editors. Hope you found it useful as I did!
posted by moiraine at 2:13 AM on April 30, 2010