Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with wordprocessor

Formatting Differences in MS Word on Windows vs Mac

spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:35:47 -0800

How consistent is MS Office between Windows and OSX? Will using MS Office on my Mac solve this formatting problem I'm having? I'm have a MacBook Pro running Leopard,and I've been using Open Office to write my papers. It's great. I love Open Office (and love that it's free). When I need to turn something in, I just save it in PDF format, e-mail it to myself, then go to a computer lab, check my e-mail, and print off the PDF document. Perfect.

The problem is that I have a professor who needs some documents turned in via e-mail, and they use MS Word. I can save an Open Office document as a Word file (.doc or .docx), and for plain text formatting that's fine, but as soon as an outline or numbered list is created, things look crazy. It seems fine when I save it in Open Office, and it's fine when I then open that document using Open Office, but if the document is opened with MS Word, the formatting is horrible.

I can buy the MS Office suite for Mac at school using my student discount (it's around $35 I think). If I install that, and use Word to create these documents, will they appear the same when my professor opens them using Word, on her Windows computer?

If there will still be differences then I'll skip the $35 and just keep going to the computer lab to tweak things.

If I save a document in MS Word on a Mac and send it to a person using MS Word on a PC, are there formatting differences?

Ugly little field codes in Word

Jimbob — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:34:49 -0800

How do I stop Word 2000 (Windows) from displaying field codes constantly? This has started happening in last week - while editing Word documents, whenever I make any kind of major change to the document, or do something like print a page, save the document, all the fields get reverted back to field codes, forcing me to constantly select all, right click, and "Toggle Field Codes". Two minutes later, the field codes will be back again. I rely on fields a lot for Endnote references, tables of figures, tables of contents etc. What's doing this, why now, and how can I stop it?

mac word processor w/ multiple document gui?

viscountslim — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 21:38:47 -0800

I'm looking for a (good) Mac word processor with some sort of GUI for viewing and navigating among multiple open RTF and text documents, a la the TextWrangler document drawer. I specifically want the documents to remain their own separate entities, as opposed to being gathered in a database or project file as with Scrivener or Mori. A pleasing appearance would be a bonus. I'd also be interested if there's a Linux app that does this.

What is the secret to being able to edit documents on different word processors without screwing up the formatting?

GleepGlop — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 20:37:55 -0800

Word Processor formatting screwy filter: I use a few different word processors from time to time and I try to use .rtf since I understand that is a universal format yet when I load a document in a different word processor the formatting always seems to get screwed up. I don't use any fancy formatting: just text, manual indents if needed, bold, underline, maybe italics... I use OpenOffice, Google Docs, MS WordPad, MS Word mainly. The main thing that I gripe about is that the spacing between my point form notes always seems to get screwed up and I have to go through hundreds of pages potentially readjusting everything.

How to write a mathematics paper

rolypolyman — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 17:47:38 -0800

I need to write a document with a lot of algebraic formulas. What word processor / page layout program would make this quickest and easiest? I use Windows, and have available Word, OpenOffice, PageMaker 7.0, and InDesign CS2 (whether it's layout or word processor software is not a big deal). I'd like to be able to set algebraic equations quickly and with minimum fuss so I can concentrate on the flow and writing (square roots, fractions, etc).

I know LaTeX (protext?) is often recommended for math, but I am worried about overkill and a steep learning curve. I'm not typesetting a calculus textbook or anything like that.

I am most used to PageMaker, but it has laughable math support. I considered finding a utility that creates a formula and spits out a TIF to embed in the document, but I nixed it as it could get excessively time consuming.

What would work best? I can consider cheap shareware or freeware (this is not for a professional project).

Software Reccomendations: Writing a Paper While Keeping An Outline

rossination — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 12:19:44 -0800

Need toms help finding a good program or method for maintaining an outline structure within an essay. As you can tell, I'm having a hard time describing my problem. Basically, I want to be able to write a paper in an outline format, and then expand that outline out into paragraphs. At any time, though, I'd like to be able to go back to the outline "view" of the paper and be able to do things like drag sections around, reorder them, etc.

It seems like Omnioutliner, Word, or Pages should include something like this, but they don't seem to (I'm on a mac, obviously). Basically, I'm just looking for some embedded structure to be preserved when I go from outline -> double-spaced MLA style paper.

I'm not writing dissertations here, either. This is mostly for simple, easy-peasy 5-10 page papers.

Any ideas? Obviously, free or cheap programs are appreciated. I'm seeing some of these types of features in "novel writer" programs like Ulysses and Scrivener, but those still seem like overkill for the small scale that I'm working at. Plus, they're a bit more than I'd like to spend (even Scrivener). But, if you can convince me that it's worth a second look, go for it.

[Also, should this go in "writing & language", or "computers and internet"?]

Looking for a mac word processor with French language support to replace Word

Frankieist — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 03:45:32 -0800

I'm looking for a mac word processor with French language support (spelling and grammar) to replace Microsoft Word 2004. I'm studying French and find that Microsoft Word's built-in French grammar check helps me catch a lot of careless errors (accord, proper use of subjunctive, etc.), but since Word runs through Rosetta on my macbook it's a major resource hog and a bit too buggy for writing compositions.

I'm specifically interested in a native (Cocoa) application - not run through X11 or Windows through emulation/virtualization. The formatting doesn't have to be great as long as it has rich-text support. I'd also be open to any suggestions for applications solely designed for grammar checking should such a program not exist.

Help an accent-deprived thesis writer do her thing.

anjamu — Tue, 09 May 2006 16:42:08 -0800

I am looking for word processing software that will do very specific accented-character-related tasks. I've been using MS Word to type in Spanish/Portuguese for as long as I can remember, and I quite like using the shortcuts Word uses for accented characters (for example, Ctrl + Shift + ~ followed by n produces ñ).

However, last week, my not-so-trusty old Toshiba pooped out on me. Having just bought a new computer, I don't have much of a budget for expensive new office software.

Are there any freeware or open-source word processors that will let me use these shortcuts or enter my own? I tried OpenOffice, but macros are cumbersome and frankly a bit over my head. Any other suggestions?

Can I get a hybrid text file/spread sheet?

oddman — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 13:19:43 -0800

I'd like a word processor that mimics Excel sheets. I've been giving some very good advice for making progress on writing my dissertation. The advice involves keeping a writer's log. In thinking it over, it occured to me that a word processing program that allowed you to keep seperate sheets inside of a single file (just like Excel does) would be great for this. E.g. I would a have a file named "Writing Log" and inside I'd have a separate sheet (selectable via tabs) for each project that I'm currently working on. Thus granting me ease of use and ease of organization. (A folder with multiple independent documents just isn't the same.) Does anyone know of a program that does this?

I know I could just use Excel but I'd rather not deal with having to use cells to support a lot of text.

Barring a program that does this natively could anyone suggest a work around that accomplishes the same task?

footnote management in large Microsoft Word documents

Dr. Wu — Tue, 24 May 2005 12:25:47 -0800

My dissertation consists of about 320 pages, split up over seven chapters; each chapter is a separate document. I'd like to combine the seven chapters into one single megadocument, which is easy enough. But I'm having some trouble getting the numbering of the footnotes the way I want ... Basically, Word will automagically run the footnotes together. If Chapter One's last footnote is numbered 44, the first footnote in Chapter Two will, once placed in the megadocument, be 45. I don't want this. I want a single, large document with footnotes that begin at #1 for each chapter. And I can't figger out how to do this. Any ideas?

I'm on a Mac running 10.3.9, and it's Word 2004, version 11.1

I want a text tool that can search documents for phrases within X words of a target.

carter — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 07:23:39 -0800

Text search tool: I'm looking for a word processor or text tool, that will allow me to search documents for phrases centred about particular words. I want to be able to specify a 'window,' say of 15 words; and the tool will then return *all* the text that occurs 15 words either side of the search target. Example: if I searched this AskMe page for "fanboy" as a target, and set my window as '6,' I would expect to get - "aren't trying to show off their fanboy Pitchfork-esque indie creds. The less politics" - from alidarbac's question below, as one of the returns. Free/share/commercial-ware all acceptable. Many thanks!

Looking for a simultaneous multi-user word processor program

profwhat — Tue, 31 Aug 2004 10:04:35 -0800

I want a word processor that lets two users simultaneously edit the same document. Every word processor I've used since, like, 1982, only lets one person edit a document at a time, for fear of people saving over each others' changes. In this modern age, I'm sure that someone has figured out a way to have changes be instantly transmitted to the other user over the network. Any leads?

Can anyone recommend a good Mac OSX native word processor that isn't MS Word?

Prospero — Sun, 21 Dec 2003 19:52:15 -0800

Can anyone recommend a good Mac OS X-native word processor that isn't Microsoft Word? [more inside] I'm usually fine with using Word X, but now I'm handling a fairly long document that needs relatively complex formatting (different headers and footers in different places; suppressed headers for first pages of chapters; etc.), and Word's usage of "sections" to handle all this stuff is driving me nuts.

My previous word processor of choice, WordPerfect 3.5, tied formatting changes to pages, not to "sections", and allowed you to suppress formatting elements for individual pages. (It also created files that were about half the size of Word's bloated files.) But WordPerfect for Mac is no longer supported by Corel, and a series of conversion filters between WP 3.5 running in OS 9 and Word running in OS X is too much to wish for.

So is there any word processor out there that has better ease of use than Word and runs native in OS X? Compatibility back and forth with Word would be nice, but if it were easy enough to use, and I could convert this file I'm working on from Word to this other processor with minimal loss of formatting, then even if I couldn't convert in the other direction I'd be willing to turn my back on Word.