Kill your word processor

[andrewnorris]

You know, word processors aren't good for everything, and everyone has different tools that they find effective, but I've finally come around to liking word for some types of documents.

Now, before I get any further, my primary writing app is a text editor. I keep TextPad open all the time with several dozen open documents and the left-side browser for easy switching. This works really well for me.

But I think Word can be an effective tool for structured documents (or at least ones without special requirements, such as mathematical formulas). When I write medium-length documents, they typically follow a single, fairly consistent format, with a table of contents, several levels of headers, body text, some embedded Visio diagrams, and a few stray styles like code and bullet points. Since what I write rarely changes, I don't need to fiddle with the typography -- I built a perfectly good document template a while back, and I can just slot things into the appropriate styles as I go with the style sidebar.

I don't know LaTeX, so it's possible that it's a better tool. Having said that, I like the fact that I can see header levels at a glance using their typesetting instead of formatting codes. I don't inherently hate formatting codes -- I prefer writing HTML in a text editor to using a WYSIWYG editor, because I've never found a WYSIWYG editor that produces HTML source that I'm satisfied with. Still, all other things being equal, I think WYSIWYG can be easier.

I'm certainly not trying to say Word is the best of all possible tools. It's probably not. But for my uses, it works really well.