Robin Turner
Word processors can make life easier or more difficult for us, depending on:
which program we use;
how much we know about it;
how efficiently we apply what we know.
Consequently, we need to ask ourselves the following questions:
What do my documents normally require in terms of layout? Do I use a lot of tables, pictures or footnotes, or do I just want simple text?
Are my documents going to be used by other programs, or for other purposes (e.g. web pages)?
Which program best fulfils these needs?
What do I need to know in order to make it do all this?
Whatever word processor you decide to use, spend some time learning what it can do and the easiest way to make it do it. A few hours spent learning the basics can save you a lot of time later.
Most word processor users spend far too much time on the details of formatting. Following a few simple rules can make life easier.
Your document is something to be read, not put on a wall and admired for its artistic qualities. Concentrate on making it readable, not beautiful. On the other hand, a badly-formatted document is harder to read, and may annoy the reader.
Unless you have a very good reason for doing otherwise, use one font for the whole of your document. Having a lot of different fonts makes things confusing for the reader, and wastes your time into the bargain. Use a standard font (e.g. Times Roman, Bookman or Helvetica).
In general, you should only use bold for headings. Use italics for emphasis, for foreign words or for titles of books.
Keep tables simple. Using a lot of colours and patterns only distracts the reader. Similarly, only use borders round text if it serves a structural purpose.
Unless your program handles indentation automatically, use the tab key or the rulers to indent text, rather than hitting the space bar repeatedly. Check to see if there are pre-defined styles for things like blockquotes.
Find out which things your program can do automatically (lists, styles etc.). If necessary, find out how to stop it doing this (look for a menu entitled "Options", "Settings" or "Preferences"). Many features are useless or annoying (e.g. changing (c) to ©).
Get to know your keyboard, especially how the Ctrl, Shift, arrow and page keys work (e.g. in most programs hitting Shift-End will block all text to the end of the line). Find out what the Alt or Alt Gr key does in combination with other keys; you may not have realised that your keyboard can produce characters like â or î, for example. Learn the most common key-bindings ("hot-keys" or "shortcuts"), e.g. Ctrl-B for bold, Ctrl-S for Save etc. Remember that when you are typing, your hands are on the keyboard, not on the mouse.
Do major formatting, such as page breaks, right at the end.
An irritating feature of word processors is that they all have their own formats for saving files. Not all word processors can read all file formats, so be careful which format you save in if you want other people to be able to open your documents, or if you want to open your own document with a different program. Use the "Save as" or "Export" commands from the "File" menu to see what formats are available. Some common formats are as follows:
.txt Plain Text Format (ASCII). No formatting at all really, but very compact. Can be read by any word processor, or inserted into e-mail.
.rtf Rich Text Format. Has some basic formatting (e.g. italics). Not sophisticated, but can be read easily by most word processors.
.doc Microsoft Word Document. Only really suitable if you are only going to use it with MS Word; some other word processors can read it, but they may lose some formatting in the process (recent versions of OpenOffice can handle them OK). Moreover, there are different versions of the .doc format, so, for example, you may not be able to read Word 97 documents in Word 6.0. Another problem is that it is vulnerable to macro viruses (e.g. the notorious "Love Letter"). It is not a good idea to send or open e-mail attachments in this format.
.html Hypertext Markup Language. This is the standard format for web-pages, but can also be used by and for word processors, so it makes quite a good lingua franca between different programs.
.pdf Portable Document Format. Useful for putting long documents on the web; useless for most other purposes because it can't normally be edited. Needs a special program (e.g. Adobe Acrobat) to read it.
.ps PostScript. Used mainly for sending files to printers. It can also be viewed using programs such as Ghostview, but can't be edited unless you are prepared to spend years learning how to do it.
.tex TeX, a typesetting format which is useless in itself, but can be converted easily into other formats such as PostScript, PDF, RTF or HTML.
.odt Open Document Text. A new format adopted by Open Source prokects like OpenOffice and KOffice.
.xml XML (eXtended Markup Language). A kind of all-purpose format on whic other formats can be based. Word 2003 uses a variety of XML.
Other formats, such as .lyx, .kwd, .sdw and so on, are only used by one particular word processor, and therefore need to be converted into something else if you want other programs to be able to read them.
If all this seems unnecessarily complicated, that's because it is. Fortunately, there are moves to standardise document formats (by basing them on XML) which will hopefully make all this obsolete in a few years' time. In the meantime, HTML is probably the best common format to use if you want your documents to be read by different programs. Even here, though, not all programs produce standard HTML (e.g. MS Word produces HTML that looks fine on Internet Explorer, but may come out strangely on other programs).
Contrary to popular opinion, Microsoft Word is not the only word processor in the universe. It is up to you to decide which program is best for your purposes. No program does everything well; all of them have advantages and disadvantages.
The one we all know and love (?). Does most things fairly well, but does nothing very well.
Availability | Commercial software, i.e. you have to pay for it, and can't (legally) copy it. |
Operating System | Windows, Macintosh. |
Advantages | Familiar to most users. Lots of features. |
Disadvantages | Very expensive. Unstable (i.e. it crashes frequently). Keeps trying to change what you've written. Vulnerable to viruses. That horrible paper-clip |
WordPerfect is very similar to MS Word. It used to be one of the most popular word processors, but is now rarely used.
Availability | Commercial software. Trial version available for download. |
Operating System | Windows. |
Advantages | Lots of features. Lots of templates. |
Disadvantages | Expensive. Not in common use. |
This is part of the OpenOffice suite, and is the main competitor to MS Word.
Availability | Free download from www.openoffice.org. CDs often given away with computer magazines. |
Operating System | Windows, Linux, Macintosh. |
Advantages | Lots of features. Can read and save documents in almost any format. Can produce PDF documents. Can produce clean HTML and XHTML for putting on the web. |
Disadvantages | Uses a lot of system resources, which means that it's very slow on older computers. |
This is a new frame-based word processor / desktop publishing program which comes as part of the KOffice suite. Basic operations are similar to MS Word or OpenOffice, but text is included in frames, which can be added, superimposed, moved around etc.
Availability | Free download from www.kde.org. |
Operating System | Linux, Unix. |
Advantages | Very flexible and powerful - you can make this program do almost anything. DTP-style formatting with frames. Can produce and edit PDF documents. |
Disadvantages | Not easy to use. |
A cute little word processor, designed to make writing documents as simple as possible and take up little space on the hard disk.
Availability | Free download from www.abisource.com. |
Operating System | Windows, Linux, Unix, Macintosh. |
Advantages | Small (and therefore quick to download). Simple and easy to use. |
Disadvantages | Not as many features as other word processors. Not part of an integrated office suite |
A document processor or high-level typesetting program rather than a word processor. With LyX you just tell the program what you mean, and let it sort out most of the formatting itself.
Availability | Free download from www.lyx.org. |
Operating System | Windows, Linux, Unix, Macintosh. |
Advantages | Produces very high-quality output. Can produce PDF files. Ideal for academic writing. Formatting is very easy. |
Disadvantages | Formatting is rather limited. Not part of an integrated office suite. Takes a little time to get used to. |
A text editor is different from a word processor, in that it records text but does not format it, except sometimes line breaks and tabs. No bold or italic, no different fonts or font sizes - nothing! This may make it sound rather useless, but in fact, if you don't need any formatting, a text editor is better to use - it is simpler and quicker, and the output (plain text format) can be read by any program running on any computer. Some text editors have other functions, such as for writing in programming languages, sending e-mail and so on. Common text editors are Notepad (Windows), KWrite (Linux/Unix) vi (Linux/Unix) and emacs (most systems).
HTML editors are designed for writing webpages, but they can also be used as word processors if you want. You don't normally have as much control over the fine details of text formatting and layout, but with a little practice they are easy to use, and have the advantage that they save documents in HTML format. They can be divided into "proper" HTML editors, where you write in HTML, and WYSIWYG ("What you see is what you get") editors, which work more like word processors.
Examples are:
Mozilla Composer (WYSIWYG - available for all operating systems). This is the HTML editor that comes with the Mozilla browser.
Nvu (WYSIWYG - available for all operating systems). Another editor from the Mozilla project. This seems slightly better than the one bundled with Mozilla itself.
FrontPage (WYSIWYG - Windows, Macintosh) Note: if you want to use this, get the full version, not FrontPage Express, which produces non-standard HTML.
CoffeeCup (Windows).
Quanta (Linux). This is probably the best for serious web design, though it's WYSIWYG capacities are limited.
OpenOffice also has a WYSIWYG HTML editor.
All the above are free, except for the full version of FrontPage, and CoffeeCup (which is shareware).
Probably in the future there will be no difference between a word processor and an HTML editor; one program will do both jobs.
Word processing is a personal thing - features which some people regard as indispensable are merely an irritation to others. My personal recommendations are as follows:
For general purposes, use OpenOffice.
When possible, use LyX for academic writing, unless you need complex formatting or need a lot of integration with other programs. LyX feels a bit weird at first, but is much easier to use in the long run.
If you have a slow computer, use Abiword.
If you don't need any formatting at all, don't use a word processor, use a text editor (e.g. Notepad or the Linux/Unix equivalents).