Writers want so little of a word processor it’s a miracle we’re disappointed so often. With my own work it’s all very simple: I need control, speed, reliability and the ability to get on with the job without unnecessary complexity or a long learning curve.

Word’s been letting us down on most of those points for years. The present version for the Mac is simply appalling. Office 2007 for Windows introduced a hideous blue background and a new ribbon instead of dropdown menus. Why? What did we do to deserve this?

When I looked at the product page for the forthcoming Word 2010 my heart sank. All it talked about was fancy fonts and collaboration features mainly. Who do Microsoft talk to about these things? How many users have been sitting out there wondering, ‘How can I possibly write the third quarter financial report without some 3D glowing versions of Helvetica Neue?’

I dunno. But I downloaded the beta for Word 2010 anyway and set a pickaxe on it. And what do you know? Beneath all that bling there’s a very fine word processor for creative writers here. Probably the best there is, and one that certainly blows my present favourite Apple’s Pages straight out of the water. Let’s see why.

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<strong>Appearances</strong>

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/image.png"><img style="display:inline;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;border-width:0;" title="image" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/image_thumb.png" border="0" alt="image" width="244" height="82" align="right" /></a> I can’t work with ugly software. It hurts. At first glance Word 2010 is horrendous – all ribbon tabs and complexity. Stick with it. Here’s how to get rid of the crap. First choose a nice, dark, minimalistic look by going to File, Options, General and choosing the Black colour screen. Things look better already.

While you’re in Options go to Customise Ribbon and untick the tabs you don’t want to see.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/image1.png"><img style="display:inline;border-width:0;" title="image" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/image_thumb1.png" border="0" alt="image" width="215" height="244" /></a>

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/windows2.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-3986" title="windows2" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/windows2.jpg?w=300" alt="" width="300" height="175" /></a>After that click the little up arrow on the right of the ribbon. The blasted thing will then disappear and stay gone till you want it. Your editing space will now look like this. Go on. Click and see what it looks like. You know you want to.

Pretty good, eh? Bear in mind this is on a <em>big</em> screen at maximum size, hence all the grey space. It can be got rid of easily enough. Customising this thing is very, very easy indeed.

In short: it may look like an X-Factor finalist doing a Lady GaGa impersonation out of the box. But it's easy to tone things down to the stuff that really matters.

<strong>Finding things</strong>

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/image2.png"><img style="display:inline;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;border-width:0;" title="image" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/image_thumb2.png" border="0" alt="image" width="199" height="576" align="right" /></a> One of my pet hates of most word processors is the way finding text hasn’t changed since 1985. You hit Find, up comes a dialog box, you type in the word you want and then the WP bounces from one instance to the next. Pages doesn’t work this way. Nor does Scrivener. They <em>can</em> if you want. But more usefully they will let you search for text and see it in all instances and in context.

Microsoft must have been watching because they’ve introduced something very similar in Word 2010. First call up the Navigation pane which you’ll find under the View tab. This is a very handy thing all round as we’ll see later. Choose the rightmost icon at the top, type in a word and you’ll see it in context throughout the whole document. Choose the middle icon and you see all the instances in thumbnails of the page. The left one gives you it in the outline.

Caveat: Pages will do this for every word. Word 2010 squeals if there are ‘too many’ instances and won’t show you them. I’ve no idea what ‘too many’ is. But it’s no big deal and this is a beta, remember, so maybe it will be better in the release version (though on past form I won’t hold my breath).

Now for more from that Navigation pane.

<strong>Outlining gets better… at last</strong>

<img style="display:inline;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;border-width:0;" title="image" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/image3.png" border="0" alt="image" width="182" height="244" align="right" />You could always outline in Word. But it was ugly and unintuitive. No more. The basics are the same as ever – you set outline styles then type in headings and sub-headings in an outline view. But now you can see them in the navpane – and this, trust me, is something potentially huge.

Once you’ve started creating headings and sub-headings they are visible <em>and changeable</em> in the navpane. Here’s an example. If I want to move chapter two to chapter one I just drag it, much as I’d do in Scrivener.

And because that heading is auto-numbered the numbering will update. Watch...

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/number1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-3976" title="number1" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/number1.jpg?w=300" alt="" width="300" height="172" /></a>

I just type a simple outline and put automatic numbers on it with a right click.  Then...

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/outline2.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-3977" title="outline2" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/outline2.jpg?w=300" alt="" width="300" height="157" /></a>

I just drag the outlines around in the sidebar and make one of them a subsidiary heading with a different numbering style. Bang goes the chapter numbering nightmare (yes, I always get them wrong too when I do them manually).

<img style="display:inline;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;border-width:0;" title="image" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/image4.png" border="0" alt="image" width="237" height="244" align="right" />It gets better. Choose one of those items – it can be a heading, sub-heading, any outline element at all. Then pick Select Heading and Content here.

Another bugbear about standard word processing is that it doesn’t let you easily break a project into manageable bits. To get a scene word count in Word and most other word processors you have to select the text manually which is so painful most of us wouldn’t bother. The instant word count you get from granular writing tools like Scrivener is something that becomes second nature after a while – and it’s just not there usually.

Except it is now. Once you select Heading and Content, look at the status bar in the footer. You get this.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/image5.png"><img style="display:inline;border-width:0;" title="image" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/image_thumb3.png" border="0" alt="image" width="126" height="31" /></a>

The first count is for the selected text. The next for the entire book. So you have scene, part, episode word counts, all from a simple sidebar command, for the first time in any general word processor I know. It's not Scrivener. But it is Word, and something I suspect I'll find very useful in the revise process.
<strong>Two page proofing</strong>

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/image6.png"><img style="display:inline;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;border-width:0;" title="image" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/image_thumb4.png" border="0" alt="image" width="160" height="244" align="right" /></a>One final feature before I knock off. Word’s full screen reading view also bugged me because I thought it was just that – something for reading. It isn’t, and it’s even better now. Click the icon in the status bar to get there. Then choose the drop-down top right to see this.

Here you can adjust what’s on screen and what you can do with it. You can get the full print view, with headings and footers, see comments  and do lots of other things. Hit Ctrl F for the find bar and the navpane will come up too. Here’s what the whole thing looks like on my 24-inch Apple LED Cinema Display.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/image7.png"><img style="display:inline;border-width:0;" title="image" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/image_thumb5.png" border="0" alt="image" width="604" height="379" /></a>

And yes – you can edit and find and do anything else you’d normally do in this view. On my ThinkPad Edge’s 13.3 inch screen? I get two pages that look very much like those of a paperback book.

So I hoped I’d come to Venice able to proof the new book on screen in a form that looks like the published page. And you know what? I did, though I’d never have guessed I got there by this route.

Does this make Word 2010 a Scrivener replacement? Of course not. Scrivener whacks Word into the long grass with the ability to tag, note, count and manage individual components of a narrative. The best you could do here is add a comment into the start of each element and hope to keep it up-to-date. But as a post-Scrivener revision tool this is second to none. And for authors out there who can’t ‘write in bits’, as one of them put it to me the other day, this may be just the thing.

Even in a late beta it’s fast, powerful and, once you’ve cleared away the ribbon junk, very easy and intuitive to use. Also the proofing tools – spell-checker and thesaurus – are infinitely better than the built-in ones used on the Mac.

I’m hooked. The only question is this: how similar Word 2011 for Mac will be when it comes out at the end of the year? Are Mac users going to be sold short yet again? Microsoft have already said Mac Word will have the ribbon. I thought this was appalling news, but if the implementation is as good as it is here we should be in for a happy surprise. The only thing keeping me tied to the Mac right now is Scrivener. Just as well my Mac mini makes such a useful Windows machine too.

That's enough being kind to Microsoft for this week. My current thoughts on Windows end here.