Software for Authors

Posted by Hugh
May 17, 2011 at 11:05 AM

An interesting and unresolvable issue - except on the basis of “horses for courses”, “diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks”, “each to his own”, I suspect.

One can happily waste an immense amount of time finding, learning and testing book-writing software, when one should be writing. This is a hybrid sub-species of the Crimp and Procrastination viruses, with added bragging rights: “I use X, so I can call myself an author!” And all the while there could be a very obvious answer to the quest staring one in the face: Microsoft Word.

For me, versions of MS Word from a few years back seemed to be hugely bloated but nevertheless deficient as outliners, couldn’t smoothly enable re-arrangement of chunks, didn’t hold research as well as writing, lacked desirable long-form writing features such as custom meta-data and, worst of all, sometimes choked unpredictably on longer documents. There used to be several guides on the Internet to help one strip down Word for long-form writing, which essentially meant abandoning most of its features. And even then one feared a crash that would destroy one’s work.

The version of Word I now use occasionally is 2004 for the Mac, which is still a bit of a pig. But I’m told that the latest version for the Mac is much better, and the latest version for Windows is very good (although of course there remain desirable things it can’t do). And of course, Word does have one feature which as far as I know is better than anything comparable in similar applications, and that is “Track Changes”. That feature, plus the insistence of publishers on receiving manuscripts in .doc or docx formats make Word almost indispensable for editing and polishing of books and similar projects, in my view.

Future versions of Word will probably incorporate some of the features that its upstart rivals in the book-writing field already have. Of course those could make it even more bloated. But I think it will still be worthwhile for authors and would-bes to keep a close eye on it to see if MS can come up with a real winner for them.