Laptops All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies- P22: Okay, I’ll admit it: I’ve got a strange biography. I’ve been a writer all my life. My first semi-pro job was sports editor of my high school newspaper. (Go Commodores!) After college I was a political reporter for daily newspapers in Ohio and New York (I covered four national nominating conventions and two Presidential campaigns) and a correspondent for The Associated Press. And then, in 1983, I gave in to my inner geek and became the first Executive Editor of PC Magazine, back in the days when most people asked, “What is a PC?”. | 184 Sweating the Small Stuff Text Editors I can think of all sorts of analogies to explain the difference between a text editor and a word processor You could Dig a swimming pool with a spoon or a backhoe. Get from Boston to San Francisco on foot or by jumbo jet. Cook a six-course meal using a wood fire and one tin plate or on a grand stainless-steel restaurant stove with eight burners a griddle an oven and a built-in electronic sous-chef in the drawer. But if you re already familiar with the capabilities of a computer when it comes to managing documents displaying fonts and pictures and its modern direct connection to the World Wide Web the old name for the Internet then here s one more somewhat self-referential set of analogies a text editor is like a pencil with an eraser. With that tool you can write you can make changes and you can draw stick figures. It s very easy to use Have you ever studied the instruction manual for a pencil and cheap. A word processor Well it s got those same pencil and eraser features. But it also adds some fantastic power tools. If William Shakespeare had access to Microsoft Word he might have written 100 plays instead of a mere 38. And he could have cleaned up his spelling and grammar and maybe annotated his work with references to contemporary culture and classical texts. Here are some of the features of a typical word processor Fonts sizes styles normal bold italic and the like and colors Management and application of styles to chapter and section heads as well as blocks of text Advanced layout of text including columns embedded art headers and footnotes Spelling and grammar checkers Dictionaries and thesauruses Indexing and tables of content generators Mail-merge and form-letter functions You can easily use Microsoft Word as an example of a word processor because well almost everyone uses it. Microsoft Office which includes Microsoft Word owns about 75 percent of the market. Would-be competitors which include Corel s WordPerfect .
