Finally made my decision - and got a birthday present.

I wrote a post recently concerning my observations of differing word processing packages. I also had a birthday. At my advanced age I generally forget such thing as the numbers are growing ever higher. Someone once told me that the older one gets, the faster time progresses. It must be true because only a few weeks ago I was twenty five and now I'm older (or at least feel like it) than Methuselah.

    I thus decided to buy a word processing package because my old XP machine is on its last legs and apparently my (legal )copy of Word 2007 won't work on windows 10 - not that I can buy one yet because all the machines currently on sale are upgraded Win 8.1 machines and the OEM software allowing me to buy a native 10 machine isn't available and won't be for a few months. I can't bear upgrades because there's always rubbish left over from the old operating system and in machines which don't retail with any backup software it's too much of a risk.

    My first encounter with M/S word was version 2 about 1991. (The enormous cost of which was probably for the 1100 page instruction manual)

    I hated it. I hated what came after it as well. So I bought Word Perfect and indeed wrote four novels in WP5 & 5.1. Then Corel bought it and we all know what happened then.

    So, after trying all the free ones, some of which are very good, I finally downloaded and  bought TextMaker 2016 for windows. For £51 I also get a back up disc and free 20gig flash drive (which have still not yet arrived from Germany) and I love it. The interface is a little more primitive but nowhere near as messy as Word with all those stupid style boxes. Better still it comes with Export to EPub and PDF buttons. I'm not going to use them very often but at least they're handy.

    Depending upon where I look or ask MS Office 2016 is anywhere from £89 to £150 and Ill be hanged if I'll pay every year for Office 365.

    I sent a novel I'd created in Word and transferred to TextMaker to a friend the other day (the final test) and it opened without any formatting errors.

   So as far as I'm concerned it's money well spent.

    Now where's my backup CD and flashdrive? I could have walked to Germany and back by now.