I’ve never been a big fan of Microsoft Word, and now I’m really starting to abhor it, but it seems to be the general required submission format for files, which is icky. I find myself drafting in either TextEdit (.rtf) or NeoOffice (.odt), and I wish there was a shift in submission requirements (and formats that people email me with) to one of these two file formats so I could just never open Microsoft Word again. I’m getting two poems published in the student literary mag Prism this quarter, and in atypical fashion, I submitted hard copies of the poems. I was emailed asking for a digital copy (it’s easier for them than retyping it, of course), so I naively emailed them .rtf files. Oops, now they need .doc files. Not a huge problem, really, but it’d be nice if we could move away from such proprietary software (so says the Mac user; yes, I’m a hypocrite).
About Michael J. Faris
I study rhetoric and composition as a PhD student in the English Department at Penn State University.
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I have often thought of switching over to mac. I just haven’t done it yet. Are there any other benefits other than the word processor?
Benefits I find: speed, Spotlight (which is the best file searcher I’ve seen), good desktop publishing and graphics capabilities, less likely to crash or freeze up than Windows, can read PC files, CDs, and flashdrives (whereas a PC can’t read a Mac formatted drives or CDs), great online support through forums and how-to’s, ability to run other OS’s (like Windows, though I don’t do this), long battery life for the laptop, ease of organizing files (though I think Windows is better at this than it used to be), mobility ease (good hotkeys for moving between files and programs)…
Of course, there are problems, including that the new laptops run warm, proprietary software issues, proprietary adapter issues (such as the mini-dvi capable adapter)…