Word Processing for Writers - best programme?

biglouis

I use word massively in my online business - an older version of office and have never paid for it although I could claim for it as a tax deductable business expense. If anything pops up that I cannot download things from a never version my techie nephew does something and fixes it for me.

Very handy to have a techie nephew, biglouis! I once had a very techie SiL but unfortunately my DD divorced him. Damn!

I use word massively in my online business - an older version of office and have never paid for it although I could claim for it as a tax deductable business expense. If anything pops up that I cannot download things from a never version my techie nephew does something and fixes it for me.

Thanks, Elegran. I have replied to your PM.

NotTooOld I have replied by private message.

You could always buy an old version of Office on E-Bay and keep using that. I am still using Office 2007 on CD and have Windows 10 on my computer. Someone told me it was dangerous which is nonsense. I've been using it for 15 years with no problems at all. You can also get an attachment which converts your document to a PDF if required which can be very handy for sharing things.

It may depend on what you plan to do with work once you've written it. I did cough up for Word after publisher not happy with OpenOffice doc.

Like the OP, I was fed up paying for Word and now do all my word processing on Libre Office Writer or Google Docs, both of which are simple and straightforward to use and compatible with Word.
I did have a three month free trial of Scrivener a few years ago but found it unnecessarily complicated for my purposes.

Thanks, Amber. I am actually trying to get out of paying, hence my reluctance to renew MSWord.

Thank you LHD. I'll have a look at LibreOffice.

Elegran - can you tell me how to get Apache to automatically number pages, please?

If you don’t mind paying, Scrivener is excellent.

The other option is LibreOffice, which diverged from OpenOffice a couple of years ago when the Oracle Corporation bought it and sold the maintenance rights to Apache.

The team that maintained OpenOffice, worried that Oracle/Apache would discontinue the project, forked the code and developed LibreOffice independently as Open Source software.

The consensus in the IT community seems to be that Oracle/Apache are performing minimal maintenance and bug-control on OpenOffice whereas LibreOffice continues to develop the product and put out regular upgrades.

I'm sure both will do the job for you but I do think that LibreOffice is the most likely to still be around in the longer term.

Thanks, Elegran. I'll have a look at that.

Apache OpenOffice is a free opensource suite of text document processor, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, database, and formula, with templates.
www.openoffice.org/
I have mostly used the text processor, but the other apps interlink with that. It is compatible with Microsoft Word etc, and is very similar.