![]() That’s a shame some of those old words were pretty good. The problem is, a lot of those old files are useless to me now: None of my current word processors can read them. I’ve got document files in formats ranging from MacWrite to Pages and everything in between. Looking back through my old files, I’m amazed to see how many word processors I’ve used over the years. ![]() Writer David Sparks addresses just this issue: I was thinking about this when I read an excellent article at MacWorld, “Forget fancy formatting: Why plain text is best.” I’m sure it could be done, somehow, but I couldn’t figure out how. I have some documents I trashed: I had no idea how to retrieve the information in them. The longer you wait to convert those documents, the harder it gets - until it’s nearly impossible to retrieve the text. I’ve actually known about this issue for years - I wrote a column touching on it three years ago - but I only decided to tackle it now, in part because I’m trying to weed out documents in old file formats (old Word, old AppleWorks) before I upgrade to Apple OS X Lion.Īnd I’m guessing plenty of writers - or, really, anyone who’s used a computer for writing (uh, like everyone) - have no idea that they may have many, many orphaned documents on their computers. When Microsoft “upgraded” to Office 2008 for the Mac, the company decided it was necessary to make it super-difficult to work with some older Word file formats. Over the past couple of days, I’ve been opening 1,000+ Word documents on my computer, one by one, and converting them from a very, very old Word format (“Microsoft Word 1.x-5.x”) to something I’ll actually be able to read and open on my computer. In fact, I’ve been frustrated over the past few years over the need to use so many different writing tools (Word, Google Docs, Pages, and so forth), depending on what I’m writing (and whether I’m collaborating with others). This is all something of a surprise to me - my infatuation with Day One, that is - because I almost always prefer to use just one tool for writing, rather than many. I appreciate having a well-designed writing tool tailored to one task, journal writing.It’s got some stylish user interface features, like the ability to hover over dates on a calendar to scan your journal entries.A couple keystrokes, and I can “lock” the journal.I can keep the Mac and iPhone versions synced with Dropbox (or iCloud). ![]() ![]() It’s got a simple, great-looking interface.Why is this? Well, I think it’s for a number of reasons: I took a look, bought the Mac version ($10) and the iPhone version ($2), and now I’m a bonafide Day One fan. I wasn’t really looking for something new for keeping a journal - after all, you don’t need much more than a blank page - but then I heard about raves for Day One, a Mac and iOS app. Microsoft Word, of course, and Apple’s Pages, and Mellel (a Mac-only word-processor I liked for a couple of years), Google Docs, and even SimpleNote, a note-taking tool for the web and my iPhone. For years, I’ve kept a journal, using any number of word-processing programs for this. ![]()
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