You are going to spend a lot of time with your word processing program, so you better learn to love it.
The standard piece of software that people use is Microsoft Word. This is almost certainly what a publisher will use, whether book, online or magazine. If you want to get published make it easy on them. What this means is that you either need to use it or make sure that you are 100% compatible with it. There are no ifs or buts with this, you must be compatible. Yes, Word is expensive compared to the alternatives, but there is no need to use the latest version or to keep upgrading it to the latest version for general writing work. You will only use 10% of what the program is capable of, if that.
There are many alternatives to Word, from the free to the cheap. These work well. You just need to make sure that they either use the Word format to save your work or, at the very least, provide an export facility so that you can convert their special format to a Word format when you need to. The hassle with ones that use their own format is that you need to remember to convert when you want to send that article off or when you want to send a draft to a friend to proofread.
Remember that you will, for your writing work, use nothing fancy within the software. Editors and publishers do not want you to do fancy formatting of your text, lay it out in strange ways or make it look like a book. Book publishers want the simple double spaced, paragraph indented format. Magazine publishers will generally want a single spaced, non-indented format to make it easy to edit and drop into their publishing software. Don’t deviate from what people expect, it just gives them an excuse to reject you.
Word processors are weighed down with features you won’t use for your writing, but you may end up using them for other things. Mail merge can be useful if you maintain mailing lists and need to send out a lot of standard labels or even just print address labels. I sometimes use the formating features to get an idea of page length when writing, reformatting before sending anything off. But none of this is critical. Don’t waste time learning a whole lot of functionality that you may never need. Just concentrate on the basics and leave the rest until you have a real need.
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