Microsoft have released two new versions of Word: <a href="http://davidhewson.com/2010/05/05/word-2010-for-windows-wonds-well-hidden/">2010 for Windows</a> and <a href="http://davidhewson.com/2010/11/06/thank-you-microsoft-for-the-worst-word-processor-ever/">2011 for the Mac.</a> The first is fantastic. The second should make them hang their heads in shame.

You can scream all you like about Word but it's hard to avoid it. Books are submitted in Word. Sometimes they come back with comments and change tracking as part of the editing process. It's the <em>lingua franca</em> of publishing. I can't imagine delivering a book that doesn't, at some stage, go through Word before submission, even if it's only to check that the translation to Word format from some other program has gone smoothly.

I had to do one major edit in May and, out of interest, decided to try that in Word for Windows, even though the book was mainly written on a Mac. The process, as you can read in the post above, was wonderful. This really is a major piece of software for an author, capable of handling the mosaic approach to a book -- breaking it down into component parts of chapters and scenes -- very well indeed once you understand how to manage it.

As an added bonus you get <a href="http://davidhewson.com/2010/08/17/onenote-a-place-to-keep-everything/">OneNote</a> in even the cheapest Office package, Student and Home. That's currently £79.99 for three PCs on Amazon. An absolute bargain.

The killer features of Word 2010 are its ability to count scenes and chapters and allow you to move them around in the sidebar, just as Scrivener does. This is handled so well you'd think Microsoft's Mac team would leap to copy it for their new 2011 version. Well they don't. Word 2011 really is a huge disappointment, and in the new Mac version of Outlook they have managed to create a program that actually achieves <em>less</em> than the rather flaky app it replaces, Entourage.

Big disappointment. If Apple come out with a decent new version of Pages next year they could knock Office out of the market. For authors anyway.

Before anyone asks... yes I did move over to Windows because of Office 2010 and the new capabilities of Word and OneNote. But as we'll see with the next post things have changed in the Mac world too. So now I'm running both Mac and Windows side by side in my office, and using the one best suited to the project in hand. More soon...