Nows and Forevers

I recently picked up a copy of Microsoft Word for the first time in a long while.

The last time I had a new copy of Word was 2009, when I got Windows 7 on my last PC before switching to the Mac for good. Even with a new copy of Word 13 years ago, I had long ago dropped that as my main way of writing.

As a professional writer, I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about tools. While I can write on anything and everything, I do have preferences. When it comes to the computer (analog/paper, iPhone and iPad are something I’ll write about another time), I use the Drafts app and a few other apps that synch my writing across computer, iPhone and iPad. That way I always have my writing with me, wherever I go.

When it comes to writing day-to-day articles, mostly for the web, I’ve been using TextEdit on the Mac since the late 1990s when I began writing for the web. I do it because, frankly, Microsoft Word, which

I used before, became too much of a pain. Word put in garbage coding that I would have to delete, and I would have to manually repaginate everything so there’d be no problems on the web. And smart quotes and some other types of characters would never render properly.
So I ditched it.

I’ve written thousands of stories and millions of words on TextEdit, and it’s fine. It’s a no-fuss, no-muss word processor or text editor, or whatever you call it these days. It’s served me well. Longer form stories I’ve used either Ulysses or Scrivener, and I’ve also dabbled in IA Writer and Byword. It seemed for a long time I was buying and trying out one or another word processor.

A few weeks ago I saw an ad for Word and I ended up picking it up. I have dozens of files from the late ’90s and early 2000s that I had trouble opening, especially due to the passwords I put on them. I figured a fresh copy of Word would be just the thing to unlock them.
And it was.

It’s hard to believe that I would remember the passwords from so long ago. I have trouble remembering the many passwords now. But back then, I had something on my mind that would become very important in my life, and the password was adjacent to that. And I would never forget.

And I didn’t.

It’s odd, finding something you wrote that you haven’t read in a while. (That’s another story.) But I needed to see what I had written, raw and telling, back then. It didn’t disappoint.

Since then, I’ve not abandoned what I’ve been writing with. But I’ve also, between home and work, I have been writing a few things in Word. Experimentally.

You know what? What I thought was bloated back then has seemed to be better now. The spelling and grammar checks, which I like as a backstop but haven’t used much, have caught a few things that I had missed. It’s been satisfying, putting the words one after another on the blank canvas of Word. And the coding issues seem to be gone. Only the smart-quotes remain, and I can live with that. Or figure a workaround.

So I’ll probably be using Word more. I won’t make it my main way to write text. But it has surprised me, and maybe I was too quick to ditch it, all the way back then.