Alternatives to Word

April 2, 2004 9:36 AM

Bah! I'm working on a Word doc and this program is driving me just batty. It's too clever by half all over the place -- wanting to add hyperlinks, format this way and that-- all kinds of stupidity that are keeping me from controlling the layout the way I want. Any suggestions for a nice, simple word processing program that will just give me the basics of font and tab control and without all of these M$ bloaty gewgaws that get in my way? Stop me before I fire up Illustrator!
posted by mimi to computers & internet (24 comments total)

Is WordPad (Start, Programs, Accessories, WordPad) inadequate?
posted by trharlan at 9:39 AM on April 2, 2004

In Word, go to Tools > AutoCorrect..., select the "AutoFormat As You Type" tab and deselect everything there. Why this is enabled by default we'll never know.
posted by cbrody at 9:45 AM on April 2, 2004

Hrrm... I don't have Wordpad. Cbrody, you're awesome! Thanks for that tip.

However, I'm still having the problem in that I need to cut & paste stuff from the web, and Word is interpretting the formatting and <img/> bullet points. Any way to force this thing into plaintext?
posted by mimi at 9:54 AM on April 2, 2004

Try Edit > Paste Special and play with the options there.
posted by Pockets at 9:59 AM on April 2, 2004

I have WordPad now :-) Thankee!!!
posted by mimi at 9:59 AM on April 2, 2004

Any way to force this thing into plaintext?

Oh yeah: Edit > Paste Special... > Unformatted Text

I use that all the time for cutting-and-pasting text from any web page into Word.

On some of the auto-formatting stuff (URLs, ellipses), you can hit backspace once after the auto-formatting occurs and the formatting will be un-applied.

I agree, though, that this kind of stuff sucks. The only thing I really like about Word over other text processing options is the fact that it puts little red squigglies under all my typos. (Because I never misspell a word. HA!) I wish I could make BBEdit do this. (Maybe I can — anyone know?) And I wish I could find a Windows-based text editor that resembles BBEdit but puts little red squigglies under all my typos.
posted by jdroth at 10:05 AM on April 2, 2004

Laterally, Text Cleanup will clean up (remove formatting, extra whitespace, etc.) any text copied into the clipboard, and it can do it transparently and automatically in your systray, has a ton of options, etc. I use it almost daily to import Word text into Freehand sans formatting.
posted by signal at 10:20 AM on April 2, 2004

Oof! Thanks for the tip. I hate this program all the more.
posted by mimi at 10:35 AM on April 2, 2004

jdroth: You might look at UltraEdit for a text editor comparable to BBEdit on Windows. I have not used the program for several years, but it definitely had some useful features.

As far as underlining misspelled words in BBEdit, if you are running OS X it might be able to use the built-in spell checker under the Services menu, found under the menu item BBEdit. I am not in OS X at the moment, so I cannot tell you for certain if that works. Or if you have Entourage you could type a reply there. It is how I prepared this message.
posted by the biscuit man at 10:50 AM on April 2, 2004

Two choices:

Abiword. Nice and cleaner than anything. Best choice.

OpenOffice. Spend a lot of time turning off stuff. Probably a bad choice.
posted by shepd at 11:32 AM on April 2, 2004

On OS X, I've been impressed by the usefulness of the misleadingly named "Text Edit." It's better than Word Pad on my Windows machine, and it's not as much of a pain as the honorable but sort of clunky Open Office (which, depending on your environment, may not play nice with other cut-and-paste applications)

AbiWord's nice except for the crashiness (maybe they've fixed this) and its weird file format.
posted by inksyndicate at 11:35 AM on April 2, 2004

Related question: when I start Wordpad, it opens a blank Rich Text document. 95% of the time I immediately do [New File Icon] / Text Document / OK. Is there a way to automatically have it start with a blank text document rather than a blank rich text document? Some command line flag, perhaps?
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 12:23 PM on April 2, 2004

DevilsAdvocate:
I'm not aware of a way to make Wordpad open a .txt by default rather than a .rtf. Maybe some registry trickery. But check out free, open-source notepad++. Does everything Wordpad does and uses .txt. by default. I've used it for years as a replacement for Windows notepad.
posted by sixdifferentways at 12:56 PM on April 2, 2004

DevilsAdovcate:

1) Open wordpad.
2) Click File > Save.
3) Select "Text Document" from the Save As Type drop-down.
4) Check the check-box below the drop-down that says "Save in this format by default".
5) Silly warning box will pop up. Click Yes.
6) Enjoy!
posted by falconred at 1:05 PM on April 2, 2004

mimi, your experience is why we continue to use WordPerfect at work. Text formatting in Word is entirely opaque, WordPerfect, which uses a sort-of proto XML, is immediately comprehesible. Other than good handling on formatting, WP is about equivalent to Word.

Of course, if you need really good control, you could always try TeX...
posted by bonehead at 3:26 PM on April 2, 2004

Book Recommendation: Word Annoyances from O'Reilly.
posted by five fresh fish at 3:26 PM on April 2, 2004

I'm not sure if this is similar to what 6diff was talking about, but for everything except for highly formatted documents, I switched to notetab. They have a free lite version and the pro version [$20] also comes with a bunch of simple scriptable HTML tagging things you can do with it. I did all my HTML coding in NoteTab pro until I switched to a Mac.
posted by jessamyn at 7:26 AM on April 3, 2004

Oh, and hi Miriam!
posted by jessamyn at 7:27 AM on April 3, 2004

Anyone played with Lyx for OS X? It's a latex WP, but I'm not smart enough to figure it out...yet.
posted by mecran01 at 8:57 AM on April 3, 2004

I'm with jessamyn - NoteTab Pro is my default text editor. It's easy to use, and quick & small to load. Very configurable -- I've set up my toolbar with several buttons that make bulk text operations like cleaning up over-quoted e-mail text super-easy.
posted by Tubes at 3:57 PM on April 3, 2004

All it takes is some familiarity. Word can turn out great documents when in the hands of someone who cares and has taken the time to learn the software. The same is true for just about anything else that is powerful and complex.
posted by bz at 7:41 PM on April 4, 2004

And Illustrator is a heck of a lot more complicated to learn properly than Word.
posted by bz at 7:50 PM on April 4, 2004

Thanks, falconred!
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 11:09 AM on April 5, 2004

Don't know if anyone's still reading this thread, but on the off-chance...

Falconred's method worked on my Windows 2000 computer at work. On my home computer with Windows 98, however, the "Save in this format by default" box is not present. Any ideas? If not, I'll look at notepad++.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 9:22 PM on April 5, 2004