So these good folks started to scratch their heads and ask why exactly we spend so much time trying to fix messed up fonts, margins, bullet lists etc. Who’s to say that in 2025 Microsoft will still be developing Word? Or that you’ll have any way to open those Mellel files? Betting your prime intellectual property on the goodwill of software developers is not a good idea. The current version of Microsoft Word has dropped importing tools for older (let’s say pre-2005) file formats. To explain why this is significant, I should note that every once in a while I get an email from a former teacher or colleague who has an old cache of documents they wrote on some ancient word processor in the 1980s (usually word perfect) – let’s say they’re hoping to release a new revised edition of a monograph – but they can’t open the files because let’s be honest, we all threw out our floppy disk collection with those word perfect discs about ten years ago. In case you haven’t been in the loop on this change in digital writing culture, a large group of writers over the last few years – led primarily by software developers – decided to stop storing their writing in proprietary formats. They’ve since developed an iOS app (haven’t tested this yet), but in order to access my writing anywhere at any time I made the decision to jump on the “plain text” bandwagon. At the time I was using Mellel, it just wasn’t portable. Mellel also has (in my experience) extremely simple integration with several popular MacOS reference managers, Bookends and Sente. If you decide to resubmit that journal article to another publisher and they have a different format for headings? No problem, just modify the style for headings. and then Mellel does its best to apply consistent formatting to your text based on those styles. title, paragraph, blockquote, citations, etc. You set-up a series of basic styles, i.e. Perhaps most importantly, it never crashed on me once in three years of intensive use. I wrote my masters thesis in Mellel, a product which advertises itself as “The Word Processor for Professional Writers” and it is pretty good. So, I went shopping for a new tool a few years ago. I’m not a typesetter – I don’t need to set weird margins, add tab stops, adjust page width, change line spacing, or use a bunch of different fonts. Also, I can’t lug a laptop around everywhere with me, sometimes I think of the perfect sentence to add to my last paragraph while I’m on the bus home and only have a smartphone. When I’m writing, I’m already really susceptible to distractions and it takes a lot of willpower to stay the course and put words down on paper. However, for a professional writer, Word just has way too much going on. No, I’m not one of those default Microsoft haters – one of the original developers of MS Word is a close friend of mine – it’s a decent product that was a superior option in the early days. A demo version for the Mac is available for download.I wrote my undergraduate thesis (back when 30k words seemed like a big deal!) in Microsoft Word. Mellel 4.1 for the Mac costs $59 for a regular license Mellel 4.1 for iPad costs $19.99. This helps writers keep a birds-eye view of their structure as they create. The Auto-title palette now shows the flow level of selected auto-titles in the text or in the outline with a checkmark. This makes the points more apparent when displayed, and unobtrusive when hidden. With the new Story Feature, writers can create or draw story points on a line of their own. You can now set the indent for continuing paragraphs within the Auto-title setup, allowing you to set auto-indent faster and with less clutter. Users can now change the color of items in an outline, can truncate outline items so they don’t wrap and more. A Minimum Word Spacing feature gives a way to squeeze and maximize spacing. Mellel can now import Microsoft Word DOCX documents. The upgrade offers a host of new export capabilities and features for both its Mac and iPad versions. Mellel has released Mellel 4.1 ( ), an update to its word processor. Educational Institution and Student Discounts.
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