Discussion: What's Your Favorite Word Processing Program?

Photo credit: vkotis on Flickr

I am writing this post in Pages. This is normal for me, as I transitioned from writing posts in Word to writing posts in Pages sometime last fall. At the time it was mostly out of necessity—my new computer didn’t have Word and it was less expensive to buy Pages than to buy the whole of Microsoft Office.

After I was gifted with a copy of Office, however, I’d expected that I’d go back to my Word-using days and that would be the end of it.

Except it wasn’t.

I can’t fully explain why I still use Pages to write my blog posts. I tried switching back to Word, but it felt weird—the format was different, the posts looked different and I found I was more comfortable writing my posts in Pages, as I’d become accustomed to. However, while Pages has become my blog post writing go-to software, I don’t use it for novel writing or editing.

I’ve written a post on why Scrivener is awesome in the past, so I won’t reiterate the whole thing, but basically I’ve found that Scrivener is my favorite software for first draft writing and major plot structure changes, largely because of the cork board and daily writing goal features. As I start to get into critiques and more detailed edits, however, I switch over to Word.

Maybe there’s a commenting feature in Scrivener and I just haven’t found it, but Word is a pretty universal program and I have yet to find software to beat it’s commenting system. I love that I can color code my comments by CP and perhaps the habit-forming part of me doesn’t want to let go of Word after using it for years as my novel-writing software. I still translate all of my changes back to Scrivener (copy and paste is a beautiful thing), but for final edits, at least so far, I like to use Word.

So I’m weird and I switch around between Pages, Scrivener and Word, but now I want to hear from you: what word processing programs do you use, and which is your favorite?