Microsoft Word (www.microsoft.com) is the standard text-handling package in the book business. Publishers and agents will expect you to submit your manuscript as a Word file and may handle the editing process through returned Word files with comments and change-tracking. So most writers will find it easiest to own a copy of Word, even if it’s not their primary writing tool. Word 2010 for Windows is an excellent novel-writing package, however, with new facilities for shuffling scenes and chapters and seeing instant word counts for the individual parts of a book, something that has traditionally been missing in most word-processing packages. Its Mac equivalent, Word 2011, does not have these functions and remains as awkward and occasionally flaky as earlier versions of the package.
This may be best avoided by using Apple’s own word processor, Pages (www.apple.com). This Mac-only program, part of the relatively inexpensive iWork bundle, is fast and slick and can read and write Word files, including comments and tracked changes, so can be used as an alternative to the largely unsatisfactory Word 2011 on the Mac. But Apple’s Pages word processor app for the iPad is a pale version of the Mac original, incapable of comments, change-tracking and some other key features needed for book-length manuscript revision. Best avoided.
Writer (www.openoffice.org) is the word processor bundled with the cross-platform free Open Office package. It can read and write Word files but has little in the way of book-length management features, and often resembles a rather old version of Word itself. If you’ve written your book in something else and simply want to check how it looks in Word this could do the job. There are no easy and elegant ways to manage a long document divided into many scenes and chapters which, in my book, makes Writer a poor alternative to Word for lengthy fiction.