See the dotted red line below drk and nihgt? That's TextEdit's not-so-subtle way of flagging a likely typo. If you typed too quickly, you may have accidentally produced this:įortunately, your amiable word processor has your best interests at heart. Okay, got it? At the blinking insertion point, type with abandon. The burden is on you to produce clever, witty, and inventive prose, lest all that blank space go to waste. Indeed, you have come to the most challenging point in the entire word processing experience, and it has nothing to do with technology.
That line, called the insertion point, might as well be tapping out Morse code for 'start typing here.' Notice the blinking vertical line at the upper-left edge of the screen, just below the ruler. At the top, you see Untitled because no one at Apple is presumptuous enough to come up with a name for your yet-to-be-produced manuscript. The moment you do so, a window with a large blank area on which to type appears. It's about as easy as opening the program itself. The first order of business when using TextEdit (or pretty much any word processor) is to create a new document. The program is TextEdit, and it call s the Applications folder home. You won't even take a productivity hit swapping typewriter ribbons in the middle of a project.īefore running out to buy Microsoft Word (or another industrial-strength and expensive) word processing program for your Mac, remember that Apple includes a respectable word processor with OS X. Word processing lets you substitute words at will, move entire blocks of text around with panache, and apply different fonts and typefaces to the characters. If things got really messy, or if you wanted to take your writing in a different direction, you would end up yanking the sheet of paper from the typewriter in disgust and begin pecking away anew on a blank page. You would have to use correction fluid to erase your previous comments and type over them. Had you produced these sentences on a typewriter instead of a computer, changing even a few words would hardly seem worth it. The purpose of this mini-editing exercise is to illustrate the splendor of word processing. It's hard to imagine how any of us got along without word processors. Microsoft put that right with Word 2016 and has now built on this success with the 2019 version. For a long time Word on the Mac seemed the poor cousin to its Windows alternative. Apple Macbook Air – Lightest Design laptop for excel. MacBook Pro's battery don't only last for long hours, but it is optimized in a way to hold a charge for quite a long time even though you might be handling heavy-processing tasks on Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, etc. The following sentence is much more concise: That's not a great sentence - it's kind of wordy and repetitious. Ulysses is a Mac word processor I've been curious about for some time. Does the Ulysses app live up to the challenge and beat Scrivener for the crown? Ulysses App Review: A Tool For Writers.
I discover that Ulysses is a professional Mac word processor, which aims to be the best writing software, both online and off. How did we survive in the days before every last one of us had access to word processors and computers on our respective desks? (It wasn't that long ago.) Consider this sentence: But after that it's speedy.Some of us are old enough to recall life before word processors. It does take about 30 seconds to load, though.
PS - Office for Mac will in no way slow down your machine. To do so seamlessly you need MS Office for Mac, I'm afraid. From your OSX side you can "drag" your Windows Word docs right into OSX and open them with any of the above mentioned word processors.
One more thing - BootCamp in OSX allows you to install any copy of Windows that you own (and therefore MS Office). MS Office for a Mac works well but I found it disappointing that the bells and whistles don't LOOK like MS Office. To do this perfectly you will have to purchase MicroSoft Office for OSX (expensive unless your workplace offers you an employer version, then it is cheap like dirt). TextEdit and Bean will open MS Word files but not perfectly.
Another free & excellent OSX WP is "Bean". In addition to everything said here - OSX TextEdit has plain text (can be configured to act much like Notepad) and rich text.