I’m a writer, and in the biz many editors and publishers specifically ask for documents to be emailed as a Word attachment…typically in RTD format. I am aware of other office programs but have never tried any and don’t know how they stack up to Word. Can these apps save documents in an RTF format? Are there any major differences? Drawbacks?
LibreOffice has an open source word processor that can save in native Word format (.docx) or RTF. It can probably do most anything you need, I’d just give it a try and see if it works for you.
Google Docs can also save in RTF. It doesn’t have quite the number of features as Word or LibreOffice, but it might be sufficient for your needs.
I’ve used WordPerfect, for both small business and home, since 1993. Pricey but worth it.
I’ve used LibreOffice/OpenOffice and I’ve also used AbiWord. Both work pretty well.
Heh. In my corporate environment, MS Word is the standard. At least I’m not a heavy user nowadays.
But I have fond memories of WordPerfect…
Google Docs will export in a bunch of different formats, including, DOCX, PDF, ODT, and RTF.
Of course, if i’d read TroutMan’s post more carefully, i would have seen that someone already mentioned Google.
Sorry!
Gosh, yes! “Reveal Codes” was a godsend, and I got very good at programming WP macros. I wrote one very complex one that dealt out four bridge hands from a deck of cards.
AbiWord is OK
I’ve used the free OpenOffice for years, with good results.
Another LibreOffice user here. I knew it had to have rtf “save as” option. But to be sure, I just checked and it did.
Until recently, I mainly used WP 8. You see, I was a college prof in CS and got all sorts of free software. We used WP in our classes just to show students that Other Software exists. It did what I needed and worked … until the last OS upgrade.
(I also could have gotten free copies of MS Office but I knew I’d never use it.)
Absolutely everything has an option to save as RTF. Even Apple TextEdit can do that, and I imagine that so can Microsoft Notepad.
Notepad cannot save as RTF.
Wordpad can, though.
And even if something can save in RTF, it doesn’t mean it has all the formatting options or features you might need. WordPad, for example, doesn’t have basic things you would typically want as a writer such as styles, footnotes, table of contents, etc.
I’ve had problems with AbiWord and OpenOffice. Last I heard, Google was just a front-end to OpenOffice, so I’ve avoided it (though it’s possible that they’ve fixed all the issues, if true).
LibreOffice has been pretty good. It corrupted a filed that had a Japanese word in it, but other than that it has been fine. And since RTF is a plain text format, you can open it in Notepad or something like that and try to find the chunk that’s confusing it, to delete.
But if you can use one of the Microsoft products, like WordPad, I’d probably go for that. It will probably be the most stable.
If you are just using the word processor to write articles, AbiWord and OpenOffice and LibreOffice will all work fine. I think the OP will be fine with any of them.
Where you run into trouble is that all of these are mostly MS Word compatible, but the key word here is “mostly”. I’ve had issues with them as well, but mostly with formatting. For documents that they create themselves, these word processors work fine. But if you share these documents with someone using MS Word, or you open a document that was created in MS Word, you may find some things not displaying correctly and lists not being formatted correctly and things like that.
Usually when you submit an article (at least in my limited experience) they don’t want you to format it, since they are going to be formatting it themselves for publication, whether it be a web publication or a paper publication.
For the benefit of someone else coming into this thread who is looking for a free MS Word replacement, it is worth pointing out that the only thing 100 percent compatible with MS Word is MS Word.
Open Office.org was the original program. It hasn’t been updated since 2011. LibreOffice and Apache Open Office are the main forks of the original. You could try both, neither is really “better.” I think Libre gets more updates.
In my experience any of these are a good replacement for many Microsoft programs, except Calc is a piss-poor replacement for Excel.
Comparison of word processors:
with other charts.
Unless you just hate it or have some other reason you could always just use Word, it’s free online:
Where do you get the idea that MS Word is 100% compatible with MS Word? That hasn’t been my experience at all.