This may not come as news to you, but boy I hate Microsoft Word. It is a necessary evil -- publishers expect you to deliver your work as a Word file. That doesn't mean you have to use the bloated old monster to write your book. Like an increasing number of Mac-based authors these days I use something else, in my case <a title="Scrivener" href="http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html" target="_blank">Scrivener</a>.

Let me give you a quick example of one reason why. It's to do with the revision process, and how you can feel free to edit and rewrite your work at will, knowing full well that the original will never be lost.

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One simple way to do this, of course, is just to save a backup file before starting revising. Everyone should do this, and drop it into something like <a href="http://getdropbox.com" target="_blank">Dropbox</a> too just in case.

But it's also important to see revisions against the original. How does Word suggest you do this? Using some big, complicated overfussy thing called 'Track Changes'. This is what it looks like.

<img class="noborder" style="margin-left:0;" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/screen-shot-2010-03-22-at-12-02-23.png" alt="Screen shot 2010-03-22 at 12.02.23.png" width="600" height="405" />

All I've done here is delete one paragraph and inserted a few words elsewhere. What do you get? Colours. <em>I</em> <em>do not want to see colours when I am writing a book.</em> There are no colours on the final page. Get them out of there.

What else do I see? The deleted text pulled out as an aside. Which makes for a very wide screen -- try using this on a small laptop. You can tweak things so this disappears. But then you can spend half your life tweaking things in Word, and end up wondering why you're ninety years old and <em>still</em> haven't finished the damned book.

And what is all this about? Being able to edit an original text without losing what you started with. Something very simple indeed. Here's how Scrivener handles it.

Go to a scene. Hit the command 5 button. Scrivener then takes a 'snapshot' of the current scene. In order words it's stored a complete copy. You can work on the new version knowing the old one's safe and sound. And if you want just go to the Documents menu and choose 'Show Snapshots'. You see the old version. And you also realise you can store multiple snapshots, each with names and dates, so you can have several different working versions of the same scene and never, ever lose anything.

<img class="noborder" style="margin-left:0;" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/scriv.png" alt="scriv.png" width="600" height="383" />

Yes, there are things that Word can do that Scrivener can't. But they're things that I don't need. I'm not writing technical documents edited by a team of people, which is what Word seems to think. And if you use a Mac and need that level of tracking I suggest you try Apple's Pages which does the whole thing better, reads Word files, and is a lot more user friendly (though it still has colours -- damn).

Scrivener's way of tracking revisions seems, to me anyway, simple and actually very powerful. So long as you remember to hit Command 5 before you start on that groundbreaking rewrite then not a lot can go wrong.