Last fall I bought a Mac Air laptop to replace my ancient Toshiba laptop, aka “the writing laptop.” Out of habit, I would have installed Microsoft Word, but I didn’t want to pay a monthly subscription and I didn’t want to install the very old version of Word-For-Mac that I have. So I decided to try Nisus Writer Pro.

NWP is Mac-only software, but it can save files in standard *.doc format — and it came highly recommended by other writers. So I downloaded a trial copy…and never looked back!

Well, okay. Maybe I glanced wistfully over my shoulder a few times. Leaving a program I knew and understood quite well, for one that required me to repeatedly figure out how to do basic things — or to establish a way to do basic things — was frustrating. But that’s a fixed cost of change.

Since October I’ve been using NWP exclusively for fiction writing. In that time I’ve finished drafting a novel, completed a full revision of that novel, written two short stories, 90% of a novelette, and I’m presently brainstorming a new novel.

And I’m very happy I made the switch to NWP!

In the paragraphs that follow, I take a look at some of the things I like about it, but first let’s agree that a new program is an invitation to explore. I used Word for so many years that I came to accept the way I did things and I was only occasionally inspired to seek out features I hadn’t used before. I don’t doubt there is a lot I could have done with Word that I never got around to doing or figured out how to do. But since I’m new to NWP I’m much more likely to investigate possibilities.

So here are a few new-to-me features I like:

Multiple clipboards: I longed to have this feature in Word, and I looked for it, but if it’s there, I never figured it out. It’s available and obvious in NWP. This allows me to collect phrases or terms used at one point in a long manuscript, and bring them to another point. This helps ensure continuity in both spelling and meaning.

Pasting text-only: In Word I could paste text and then wait for a submenu to appear and use that to select “text only” which would get rid of styles and that was very handy. In NWP I can achieve the same thing by holding down the shift key while I do Cmd-V — which is much more efficient! (I know that in Word, you can select “paste as text only” as the default — or so I recall from looking it up years ago — but that’s not an option I want to use).

Navigator: For a novelist, this is NWP’s best feature. Navigator allows the table of contents to be displayed in a column on the side of the document. This inspired me to create three or four word descriptions of sections and apply a chapter-title style to them. This causes the section titles to appear in Navigator. I can click on those titles and easily move around in the document. Even more amazing, I can drag and drop chapter names in Navigator, reordering them, which instantly reorders the sections in the document with astonishing ease!

edit 2/27: forgot to include this!
Thesaurus: There is a thesaurus in the “tool kit” to the right of the document. Alternatives are displayed for whatever word the cursor happens to be on. My brain is still not trained to use this feature, but I anticipate it being very handy once I get into the habit of actually looking at it.

Search & Replace: Both NWP and Word let you “replace all” or replace the item you’re currently looking at and then jump to the next. But NWP offers the additional option of replacing the current highlighted item and not jumping away. This may sound like a small thing, but it’s something I’ve always wanted and I find it really handy.

To be fair though, Word has an advantage of its own in search — it keeps a running list of recent searches. So instead of retyping a phrase I’ve recently searched, if I’m using Word, I just need to find it in the list. If there’s a way to do that with NWP, I haven’t figure it out.

And here are thoughts on other features:

Comments: Like Navigator, comments also appear in a column on the side of the document. By default, both Navigator and Comments were on the left in NWP, but I was able to move comments to the right so that I have one column on each side of the document, and I much prefer it that way. I am still not able to color-code comments, a complaint I had with Word. (Yes, different authors should have different colors, but I want to be able to easily assign different colors to comments so I can distinguish between comments that are background information and those that point out a problem I still need to deal with.) It is possible to highlight text in a comment, so this is a possible work around that I might try in the future.

Still, I’m afraid Word wins the comment competition in two ways. As I recall, with Word I was able to export all comments so that they could be viewed in a separate document. This is handy for easily scanning the comments, either to look up information (I stash calculations and measurements, plus historical notes, etc., in comments) or to quickly check what still needs to be addressed. Secondly, Word has an icon in the toolbar that can be clicked to advance to the next comment (also in reverse). This lets me repeatedly click “next” without ever having to move my gaze from the comment. In other words, I don’t have to check the position of the cursor. It just stays in one place. In NWP, each comment has an arrow that you click to go to the next or the previous comment. But this requires me to readjust the cursor, placing it on the arrow each time. This sounds like a small thing but it really slows me down when I’m trying to click through all comments. As a side note, it’s also possible to use a menu to move between comments, but of course that’s even slower.

Auto saves: I’m still not sure I entirely understand NWP auto saves. Do they overwrite the original document or not? I should figure this out. Auto-saves are very frequent. I’ve set mine to make a little blip noise which I find reassuring.

Default character conversion: In word, emdashes are automatically converted from two hyphens, arrows are automatically converted from two hyphens and an angle bracket. I had to set up both conversions myself in NWP. Not a hard thing to do, but another thing that needed to be figured out.

Windows habits: I’m not certain, but there are a few keyboard routines I’ve always done that did not work in NWP, and I recognize that this may be a Mac-thing, not an NWP-thing. But I had to set up special keyboard routines to delete the next character, delete the next word, cycle between open documents, and “go to” a specific page. On the plus side I was able to set up these commands. On the minus side, I have to hold down the function key, or the function and option keys depending on the command, while pressing the delete key, or a number key. All of this is easy for me to do now, but it took some getting used to.

Alt/Option key: One of the wonderful rewards of all this relearning is that I stumbled upon the use the alt/option key to type characters like £, ¢, ≈, •, †, Ï€, ÷ etc. Sure, I should have learned how to do this decades ago, but I didn’t! If I even bothered with these characters, I would get them from the “insert” menu. Oh what a feeling of power it is to just type them! 🙂

One little drawback…
This is not NWP’s fault at all, but one little drawback of this switch is that I’m having a harder time remembering the delete-next-word keyboard command in Word — and I still use Word on my desktop. Oh well! It’s good brain training. Right?

Posted on: Monday, February 26th, 2018 at 5:15 am
Categories: Writing.
Tags: Microsoft Word, Nisus Writer Pro, word processors for novelists