A better word processor than Microsoft Word came free with your computer

If you use a Mac, that program is called TextEdit. You can find it in your Applications folder, under Utilities. If you use Windows, the program is called Wordpad, also ironically made by Microsoft. If you poke around your Start menu among the various programs, it's in there somewhere.

Both TextEdit and Wordpad have a crucial feature in common: they both use something called Rich Text Format or RTF. RTF files can include plain text like the kind in e-mails, along with basic formatting information: fonts, bolds and italics, special characters from foreign alphabets and math symbols, bullet points and the like. There's a related format called RTFD that can also include pictures. RTF and RTFD are readable (and writeable) by just about every computer program in the world, across all operating systems. Microsoft's proprietary document format has become widely compatible at this point for the same reason everyone feels pressure to speak English, but like English it continues to be a headache. There are all the different versions, and you never know when your Word doc is going to come out filled with gibberish when you pass it through another program.

So why not just use Word to compose RTFs? Because Simpletext and Textedit are easier to use for ninety-five percent of tasks, and don't elevate your blood pressure the way Word does. There are a small number of menus and toolbars, each of which does a fimiliar and practical thing. Literally the only thing I use MS Word for at this point is its Sort feature, sadly lacking in TextEdit. (But then, maybe this Google Spreadsheet thing would do that for me. Have to look into that.) TE and WP contain no animated paperclips, no suggestions as to how to better finish your letter or what have you. There are no bewildering menus within menus within menus. Best of all, TE and WP are lightweight programs that don't crash.

On the Mac at least, there's also the issue of MS Word's perverse spellcheck design. I don't know how this all stands with Windows right now, but on the Mac, the MS Office applications maintain their own separate spellcheck library from the systemwide one shared by every other program I have. A spellchecking dictionary only really becomes useful once you've customized its vocabulary to include your friends' names, slang and technical terms, and so forth. Insisting that you do this twice, once for Word and once for everything else like e-mail and Stickies, is just asinine, as Hank Hill would say.

Update: two other nice word processors just came to my attention. Steven Poole explains them in a blog posting entitled Goodbye, Cruel Word.

© ethan hein 2007 | back to memebase | back to top