Ugh. I had to bite the bullet and buy Word today. I’ve survived for several years without it, opting instead for the fully-featured (and FREE!) Open Office software. But now we’re in the editing process with “Love & Brimstone” and the editor assigned to my manuscript uses the track changes feature. So I have to have it.
For grins and giggles, I looked at an .rtf file of the manuscript and ACK! When I looked at it in OO it looked fine. Looking at it in Word, it looks like *&^%. Totally mis-formatted. Crap. A .doc version looked okay though. Whew!
So now that I have Word, I’ll use it for my formatting conversions and editing, but not for my rough drafts. I still prefer OO. I’ve got Word 2007 (I never activated the “trial” version of 2003 Office on my laptop when I bought it, and when I went to buy the activation tonight, it was the same price to get the 2007.) and the interface is TOTALLY whacked. Ugh. I hate it! I much prefer the “old style” with the clearly labeled menus and none of the extra garbage that’s up there. I’ll need to do some digging and see if there’s a way to make it look like the older versions of Word. (Ahh, the good ole’ days of Word 6. Remember those? And Windows 3.x? *LOL*)