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, made, ironically, by Microsoft. If you poke around your Start menu among the various programs, it’s in there somewhere, depending which version of Windows you have.
Until I got Scrivener, I used TextEdit for pretty much all word processing, from little notes to myself up to epic research projects. Macs come with a program called Stickies expressly for the purpose of writing yourself little notes, which has the virtue of autosaving your every keystroke. But the little stickies aren’t congenial to serious word processing. Textedit is a better general-purpose scratchpad.
Scrivener is basically just an elaborate dashboard for Textedit, so it’s no surprise that they play well together. But Scrivener is way cooler. It encourages you write first and sort later. You can drag your text files from the Finder into the desired location in your Scrivener project, and voilá, it becomes a new section, its formatting intact.
Both TextEdit and Wordpad have a crucial feature in common: they both use Rich Text Format. 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 Word document format has become widely compatible at this point for the same reason that everyone feels pressure to speak English, but like English, the many different flavors of Word documents are a headache. You never know when your Word document is going to come out filled with gibberish when you pass it through to another computer. If you’re not picky about formatting, RTF is a better choice, and if you are picky about it, there’s always the PDF workaround.
I suppose I could use Word and just save everything as RTFs, but I’d rather just write in TextEdit. It doesn’t elevate my blood pressure the way Word does. TextEdit has a small number of menus and toolbars, each of which does a fimiliar and useful thing. The only thing TextEdit doesn’t do is sort lists alphabetically, but that’s what spreadsheets are for. The lack of features is a good thing. TextEdit has a small memory footprint, so it hardly ever crashes.
On the Mac at least, there’s also the issue of Word’s perverse spellcheck. I don’t know how this all stands with Windows right now, but on the Mac, the Microsoft Office applications maintain their own separate spellcheck dictionary from the systemwide dictionary shared by every other program. A spellcheck dictionary only really becomes useful once you’ve customized its vocabulary to include your friends and colleagues’ names, slang and technical terms, and so on. Insisting that you do this twice, once for Word and once for everything else like e-mail and Stickies and blogs and Facebook and Twitter and so on, would be too lame to even consider.
Tags: cruft, feature creep, formats, minimalism, pdf, rtf, scrivener, simpletext, textedit, twitter, word, word processing, writing
hmm, am going to check this out…thanks for these practical tips…
Hi Michelle. You’re the first person to comment on my new blog. (fanfare, confetti)
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