On page 35 this month, Lynne Hackles makes an excellent point: that any financial investment you make in your writing is money spent on enriching your life. But obviously there’s no point flinging money about when you don’t have to, and in 2017 there’s one place where we can help you cut costs: software.
Of course £109.99 for the latest version of Word might be money well spent if you can’t work without it, but you can have its fully featured open source alternative LibreOffice Writer for nothing. It’s an up-to-date wordprocessing and desktop publishing tool with many of the features you may be used to in Word (and let’s face it, do you actually use every feature on the Word ribbon?) If you want templates, the Template Centre currently has 337 on offer (375 available) so if what you want isn’t there, you’re probably just being picky – there’s even a short story manuscript template, a modern literature template for novels and an ebook magazine template. As this is open source software, users can submit their own templates and add to the pool of resources. LibreOffice is available as a free download for Mac, Windows, and Linux (www.libreoffice.org).
Apache Open Office (www.openoffice.org) is also a free open source office suite and users craving a less-evolved era of word-processing like it because it’s simpler and more intuitive to use than Word has become. Files created in Open Office can be run in Word, Excel and Apple Pages. It was last updated in October last year. Its word-processing package, Writer, can handle projects as complicated as entire books complete with documents, indices and diagrams. It has a variety of templates to chose from, though compared with LibreOffice it’s harder to search for them. If you put in a bit of effort though, you’ll be rewarded with treasures including Lulu book templates in various sizes, as well as templates for graphic novels. It’s not entirely easy, but it is free and worth the effort to get to grips with it.