A Free and Friendly Writer’s Tool
As a writer, I am always looking for cool word processing alternatives to programs such as Microsoft Word and its clones. MS Word is great for corporate-level document management and complicated secretarial-type tasks. Not so great for those of us who just like to pop open a simple screen and get down to writing without fuss and bother.
Today I’m pleased to recommend a little program called Yeah Write (in fact, I’m drafting this post in Yeah Write before pasting it into the blog).
Yeah Write, besides having a clever name, is designed to take up little room, to be quick-opening, and otherwise to kick away all barriers to free and easy, anytime-the-mood-strikes writing. And there’s a free version.
The program uses a file-cabinet metaphor for organizing your documents. You can create more than one “drawer,” but you don’t really need to. Just open the default drawer, pick the most suitable format from the available tabs, and start writing.
Available formats (or templates), by the way, include “Diary,” “General,” “Journal,” “Letters” (personal or business), “Memos” and “Notes.” The program automatically opens to “General,” which I find to be sufficient for almost any kind of writing I want to do. (There’s also a tab labeled “YW Info,” which contains information on available updates and a user’s manual.)
Yeah Write has some basic formatting and editing options, such as the ability to boldface and italicize, to create bullets, and to do a find-and-replace. There’s a built-in spell checker, too, plus a few other nice controls.
But again, the main point of Yeah Write is writing. Just get in and hit the ground typing — don’t even worry about saving, because the program will do that for you automatically.
You can download Yeah Write from the Web site www.yeahwrite.com.
You can use the free version of Yeah Write as long as you like. At installation, you can choose to try out the full version for 15 days; at the end of the 15 days, if you don’t purchase the full version, the extra tabs and features will become non-functional. You can then choose to hide those features from view if you want; in any case, all the features of the basic, free version will continue to work for you.
For myself, I chose from the start to view only the free-version features. Less confusion that way.
The paid version of Yeah Write is just $29. For that you get additional features such as outlining capability, and some additional tabs representing additional document formats: address book, e-mail, fax, envelopes, phones messages, text, to do, and another business letter template.
