WordPerfect shaped me as a keyboard person, as opposed to a mouse person. I only ever used its DOS incarnations, and there were a number of things that I liked about it. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons. This was to become my word processor through my sophomore year in college, say from 1987–1991. With that switch, I began using WordPerfect. I probably spent 10 times longer formatting documents than actually writing content.Īt some point, we moved away from an Apple and obtained an IBM computer. I recall it taking a long time to perform some of these tasks, however, and looking back, I suspect it was the attempt to provide a WYSIWYG display that I found distracting. I can recall trying to make a newsletter with AppleWorks, and doing one or two book reports using AppleWorks, but as a writing tool, it doesn’t particularly standout in my mind. I used AppleWorks on an Apple ][e back when I was in junior high school. I think the very first word processor I used in a practical way was AppleWorks. And since, for me, the most important writing tool is a word processor, I figured I’d start with that. It seems that the best way to begin this process is to think about the best writing tools I’ve used in the past. I want to take the lessons I’ve learned from more than two years with my Google Docs Writing Tracker and see how I can improve upon them. All writers work differently.įor a long time I have been using a set of tools that I built myself - primarily my Google Docs Writing Tracker, and this has helped solve some of the problems that were making it difficult for me to write on a consistent basis. This is not because my way is better than any other way.

My goal with this series of posts is to explore what the ideal toolkit looks like for one writer in particular - me. The tools we choose to use as writers can help or hinder our ability to make the best use of our time. Every writer works differently, but I think we all share at least one similar goal: to make the most effective use of the time we spend writing.

Wordperfect 5.1 on windows 10