by Jerry Curtis

Created on: May 31, 2011

In comparing Mac with a PC for writing tools, Mac wins because of one crucial "tiebreaker." That would be the Mac OSX operating system's free mini-word processor, "Text Edit." Text Edit, as a stand-alone "freebee" comes with several indispensable writers' features that Windows 7's free Word Pad lacks; specifically:

. A spelling and grammar checker. That's right, imagine having to do without the faithful spell checker! Word Pad has neither, which makes it nearly useless for the serious writer. Mac's Text Edit has a reliable and comprehensive spell checker that can be set to correct spelling as you compose the document. It also includes a nice grammar checker that does a pretty good job.

. Mac Dictionary lookup. Right click a word in an open Text Edit file and get instant access to its definition in your Mac Dictionary. The same tool also takes you straight to Google if you need it.

. A document summary tool. Cut and paste a large block of text into a Text Edit window to see this feature in action. Select the text and right click. A summary window opens where, by means of a slider bar, you can scale the document down to a summarized version. Microsoft Word discarded this feature in its new version, and, of course it has never been included in Word Pad. The summary tool does a nice job of reducing a very long document to a more digestible size. Although by no means perfect, it's really not bad at all.

. A table maker. Need to make a table of figures with cell borders and backgrounds? You can do that with Text Edit, but not with Word Pad. Text Edit table editing has all the alignment and cell sizing and formatting that Microsoft Word does.

. Instant access to special characters The Text Edit edit/Special Characters option opens the Mac character sets for instant insertion of special characters (boxes, arrows, etc.).

. Lists and outlining. Text Edit has a drop-down menu of list options where you can choose numerical, alphabetical, bullet, check marks, etc., to format your numbered paragraphs or lists. Again, this feature is not available in Word Pad.

. Turn word hyphenation on or off. This is useful if you have an especially long word at the end of a line.

Of course, Text Edit is no match for the full-featured word processors like Microsoft Word when it comes to “bloat-ware” capabilities like dot-leader tables of contents and unlimited styles, themes and drawing tools. But the bottom line for the writer is getting the text to the document window by fastest and most inexpensive means possible. Using that simple standard (plus the criterion that it is included free with Mac’s OSX operating system, Text Edit makes Mac the best word processor.

Learn more about this author, Jerry Curtis.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.