Call for Entries: preferences for text format

Quite stupidly, I assume that the world runs of Microsoft Office when it comes to writing (typing).

And Barb and I are quite jazzed to get several submissions for a Guest Tutorial, one of which will run next month in the Tips and Tricks section of The Xara Xone. And everyone is going to be thrilled with this sort of sharing next month and in the future.

I'm asking people who submit tutorials in Call for Entries to please try to use WordPad if you don't own Word, because writing the tutorial in Xara requires that we copy all the text out, put it in a text file format, and then get it going in the template in WordPress, creating an extra step.

Windows 7 does have WordPad, it's just hidden pretty well! I'll assume (oops!) that you've installed your operating system to C; Wordpad.exe is in C:\Program Files\Windows NT\Accessories.

So if you own Word, terrific, please use it. If not, you don't need to buy a copy. Rich Text Format and Word's native *.doc is terrific, and so is plain text except you can't use italics and bolds and font size.

In addition to saving a little time/work, we'd gain accuracy. We naturally don't want to introduce typographical errors and mess up paragraphs.

Thanks!
Gary

And the newer version of Word opens OpenDocument format just fine (.odt extension) from either OpenOffice or LibreOffice. Embedded images come in and all styling. Not that I would desire much formatting beyond typical text formatting if I were the editor...

Just sayin' ;))

As for WordPad--should be able to find it in the Start menu, Accessories folder.

Take care, Mike

Thanks for the additional info, Mike.

The point is that in business—and let's pretend the Xara Xone is a business for a moment—you need to have software in common so you can exchange stuff.

Xara is a given on tg and on The Xara Xone. However, it's wicked difficult to get text per se out of Xara and directly into Word Press templates.

The solution is a plain text editor or a word processor. And yep, we could care less about special formatting, in fact, we really don't want or need MS-Word's special character insertion capability and other features. Because all that neatsy stuff such as auto-numbering puts garbage code in the document that can't be seen by the user.

Our target format is HTML. Anything you can do in HTML or that's supported by HTML such as extended characters (© ¢ ™, and so on), bold, italic...you get it, right?

TIA,

Gary

FYI You can simply type wordpad in the Start Menu's Search textbox and hit the Enter (Return) key to launch Wordpad in Vista and/or Windows 7.