I use an older version of MS Word on an older version of the MS Surface laptop.
I have tried it all over the last thirty-some years from Apple 2 to Mac to Linux, and AppleWorks to Lotus Ami Pro to Scrivener. My current configuration is not the best, it is the best for my current writing process.
Hardware
Lightweight, long battery life, exceptionally good keyboard. I bought my first-generation MS Surface Laptop at Best Buy on clearance for ~ $500 after the next generation had been introduced. My previous dell laptops all failed within a year or two, usually starting with the keyboard. Don’t get me started on warranty repairs… I have been pounding on this one trouble-free for almost five years.
I bought a “Home” license for MS Word since my Word XP license did not want to install on the new laptop. Minor nuisance. Since the install had to be downloaded from the internet, it chose to install O365 instead of a local static version. Major nuisance. I write offline, never connected to the internet, ever. Maybe once a year I’ll connect and get the latest updates, but I don’t worry about viruses because I am always offline on the writing laptop. O365 wanted to verify who was using their precious license every f-ing month! It would not let me open a document until I went online and verified with the overseer.
First time this happened, I was at home and I thought it was a one time thing. I was back up and running in ten minutes after finding my password on another computer. The second time I was in a camper in middle-of-nowhere Utah with no internet or password. I had to write with pen and paper for three days! Great thing about a laptop with a lighted keyboard? I can write in the dark. Can’t do that with pen and paper. Plus, I had to type everything in later. Losing time writing is a pet peeve of mine, so I was DONE with Microsoft.
I paid for Scrivener, endured the learning curve on the not-so-great Windows version, and I started to love it. I have used the Mac version and it is just plain better, but I don’t have a portable Mac so that is not what I write on.
I’m going to jump back to hardware for a moment. When you write on a never connected computer, how do you backup your files? I used to have a thumb drive that all internal hard drive files were automatically backed up to. I would daily take that thumb drive and copy newer files to a Carbonite directory on my main desktop computer. Then an internal drive (Dell) failed on me. Losing time is a pet peeve, losing work is unacceptable. Dell replaced the drive… a month later, but I was not allowed to keep the drive to attempt recovery of my precious work. Luckily it was fresh enough that I was able to remember a lot of it, but something had to change.
I began working directly on the USB thumb drive, using a second one as my backup. I use Samsung drives and they have never failed me… until Scrivener.
I never dug into the internals of the Scrivener application, but my best guess is that the save feature does not make a new file and then delete the old. It simply changes the specific blocks within the file on the drive. This is extremely time efficient. It is a requirement when working with large database files, which is why Microsoft has that feature in the Windows operating system. MS Word on the other hand takes seconds to save a large document that you only changed a few words on. Why does this matter?
It didn’t when the storage media was a spinning magnetic disk that could handle millions of changes to the state of any memory location without a failure. Solid State media, on the other hand, has about one hundred writes per location before it fails. No problem with MS Word since your document ‘saves’ march across the drive, not getting back to the original location for months if not years.
What I believe Scrivener was doing is autosaving to the same location every minute. This meant if I didn’t start a new Chapter file within two hours of writing, the save failed. This began about two months after I started using Scrivener as my primary writing software. I would be mid-sentence and look up and there would be a message from Scrivener that something went terribly wrong. Oh no, what could it be? Failure to save a file. I’d seen that in most other applications, especially when working on a network connected drive. You dismiss the box, then save to a different location. Easy. Nooooooo. The genius programmers at Scrivener do not trap and handle that error. The application crashes and work is lost. Only a minute’s worth, and you can screen shot to capture all the words not hidden by the fatal error, but you are definitely kicked out of your flow state.
At first I blamed the thumb drives and started experimenting with better quality ones. After the third lost work failure I was done with Scrivener. I sent them the bug report and never heard back from them. I still use it for short articles like my writing blog, because the organizational interface is exceptional. I never had this problem with the Mac version of Scrivener, but I don’t write nearly as much on the Mac.
I am back to MS Word, after eliminating O365 in favor of a local static version. Zero lost time or work since the change ~four years ago. I do change my thumb drives every six months just for piece of mind.
I do use O365 rarely for the Read Aloud feature, but I don’t pay for it. My partner uses it for their business, so I just piggyback on that license.