Quick question from a noob

[Stephanie Petersen]

I was looking through some of the workshop pieces and see they're submitted in Word (.docx) format. How do I get around this if I don't have Word?

 

[CageSage]

What do you have?
Most applications let you do a save as to something like .txt or .pdf or similar. Open Office allows a save as a .doc or .docx but if you can't do these things, what else is possible?
-- .pdf doesn't allow us to make comments in the document, so not as useful.

 

[David Y]

You can email a word document as an attachment to your Kindle account with the subject heading 'Convert' and the Word document will be magically converted into a Kindle eBook. Great tip for proofreading your work too. I do it all the time.

Set-up details

 

[Stephanie Petersen]

What do you have?
Most applications let you do a save as to something like .txt or .pdf or similar. Open Office allows a save as a .doc or .docx but if you can't do these things, what else is possible?
-- .pdf doesn't allow us to make comments in the document, so not as useful.

I use Open Office, though I hate it. Also Pages on my Mac. I've never been able to open a .doc with Open Office, but maybe I just don't know how. Yes, in these areas I'm a complete idiot.

 

[Stephanie Petersen]

You can email a word document as an attachment to your Kindle account with the subject heading 'Convert' and the Word document will be magically converted into a Kindle eBook. Great tip for proofreading your work too. I do it all the time.

Set-up details

Wow! OK thanks!

 

[Rich.]

Or have a go with Google docs. It's free. You can work on your stuff anywhere, on any device, and you can save files as Word docs (and it reads Word docs as well).

 

[CageSage]

I use Open Office, though I hate it. Also Pages on my Mac. I've never been able to open a .doc with Open Office, but maybe I just don't know how. Yes, in these areas I'm a complete idiot.

The Google docs option sounds a good one to copy your work and paste to that to save it as a .doc.

To open a .doc in Open Office, find the doc in the file explorer, right click, and 'open with' -- then find Open Office as the app to use to open. Should work, if not, may need to check if Open Office is up to date with updates (I don't know how to check that with Mac).

 

[Nikky Lee]

Or have a go with Google docs. It's free. You can work on your stuff anywhere, on any device, and you can save files as Word docs (and it reads Word docs as well).

Seconded on the Google docs. You can also open word docs up using Google docs and * usually * any track changes/comments transfer across.

 

[Rich.]

I have to say, since I started using Google Docs, in combination with Google Drive, I've never looked back.

 

[Nikky Lee]

I have to say, since I started using Google Docs, in combination with Google Drive, I've never looked back.

They are great. I write all my blogs with Google Docs as the header styles transfer quite nicely onto the web. My only gripe is when I'm dealing with massively long documents i.e. 130k kind of long documents. It lags a bit when I try to move around in it (e.g. when editing). Shorter stuff though, not a problem.