Program needed

[brigdh]

I'm looking for a free program to replace Word. Open Office is fine, but its word-count feature is annoyingly complicated. I hate finishing up a drabble and having to go through the whole process every thirty seconds to check the length of some new phrase.

Any recommendations? The only features I need are word count and spellcheck, everything else is optional.

Comments

[thebratqueen.livejournal.com]

http://www.writely.com

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Awesome! That looks really neat.

[thebratqueen.livejournal.com]

It's great for co-writing too. =)

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it looks like it'd have all kinds of uses. It'd make it convienent for beta readers, if not co-writers, too.

[drmoonpants.livejournal.com]

I like AbiWord (http://www.abisource.com/) a lot. The spellcheck on some of the older versions wasn't that great, as I recall, but I think it's better now.

(also your current music makes me happy)

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Ooo, looks nice. I'll download it and try.

(Yeah, I got it from you.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I use TextPad (http://www.textpad.com/) for all my plaintext needs, most especially coding, because it has a setting tha tnumbers the lines and when you have error messages telling you what line of a multi-hundred-line script is throwing errors, Notepad just doesn't cut it.

It's got word count and spellcheck, and is free. The free version does occasionally have a message pop up for 10-15 seconds when it's started asking you to send them money, but I don't mind that. :D

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Neat! Thanks for the rec.

And heh, if I minded those 'please pay us' messages, I would never be able to use bittorrent. Or half the programs on my computer.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

:D I knew someone who got irritated at the message and deleted TextPad.

What I like about TextPad is that it's got a lot of features, but you have to set them up, unlike Word, which sets them up for you so you have to go find them and turn them off. WHich is less work overall, because most poeple don't care for most of them.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Yeah, automatic features can really suck. I drove myself crazy trying to figure out how to turn off the Smart Quotes in Word a few weeks ago.

[redshoeson.livejournal.com]

Do you want my Office program?

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's okay. I feel like I don't want to keep borrowing it from you; I need something I can rely on myself, you know? Thanks for the offer, though!

[redshoeson.livejournal.com]

If you DL it once, you never have to DL again, right?

*confused*

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Well. That's what you'd think, right? But obviously, as this would be the third time I've had to borrow it from you, things do not always work out that way. No worries, I've got programs that work well enough, now.