How To Do Everything - Writers and their Macs

Overview

Ask a hundred people how they use their Macs, and you'll get a hundred different answers. Throughout this book, the Voices from the Community sidebars try to give you an idea how a variety of people solve specific problems or get the most out of their Macs. This insert looks at three writers, how they use their Macs to do their creative work, and how important it is to them to use Macs.

With the exception of e-mail and web browsing, word processing is probably the most common activity that people use computers for. In fact, recording, arranging, and editing text were the tasks performed by the first real application that brought computers into the office.

(Number crunching and calculations brought computers into accounting departments, but word processing got computers onto more desks.) The first word processors were dedicated computers, and only when personal computers became common did word processors start developing the features we are familiar with today: WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) display, advanced font and layout control, built-in outliners, notes, comments, and much more.

Let's meet three writers and see how they put their Macs to work. Each of them works in a different way, with different programs, but they all have one thing in common: they use their Macs to work with words.