- It auto-completes names
- It makes it easy to select the element that you want to work with
- It keeps an outline of your scenes on screen
- It has numerous ways to view your screenplay
- It even has a font that’s “more screenplay,” as its look has become an industry standard.

I really hope trelby keeps developing.

Myself, I find that Word rarely works for me, but most of my writing is for the web. Some writing screenplays prefer dedicated software, but many do well with Word. Find what works for you.

The assertion that Word conflicts with one’s ‘inner editor’ is downright silly: Word only flags grammatical errors and misspellings if that’s what the user asks it to do.

A screenplay is easily ‘formatted’ in Word — I know, because I’ve done it several times — by dint of ‘building’ the initial scenes (including dialog) with the industry-standard visual shorthands and upper / lower case codings, and then simply copying those four or five pages and pasting for re-use as one trundles along.

As to finishing up with a ‘large’ document, there’s something spectacularly wrong with a screenplay if that’s how it ends up: hundreds of pages is usual for a novel, hundreds of pages for a screenplay, definitely not.

Microsoft Word doesn’t topple over, either on large docs or compilations, and especially where novel writing is concerned: I create chapter by chapter, and use Word to total up the word count at the end of each so that way, both I and my agent (and my publisher’s editor) have a running, accumulative total of the MSS.

It’s simplicity itself to use Word’s footer feature to incorporate whatever is required, and especially the actual page number, be a running MSS of 600 pages or 60. If as ZB Manfred contends, Word keeps ‘crashing’ then there’s either something wrong with her / his computer or with her / his installation of the program itself.

I’m not criticising in any way the software so kindly flagged up here by MUO, simply trying to point out that (1) there’s a very good reason why publishers, editors, writers and agents use MS Word quite happily and — perhaps more importantly — that (2) far too many aspirant screenwriters get hung up on the notion of 100% accurate formatting as they go along, when in fact, the simplest annotations can be scribbled anywhere on the page, in any font, in any style, and in any position and tidied up afterwards: it’s the calibre of the creative process, not mastery of the technical process, that counts.

It’s also not good for “turning off your inner editor,” as it flags grammatical errors and spelling mistakes that maybe are intentional depending on what you’re writing. An example would be the novels Charley or Precious, in which the main character’s dialogue is deliberately constructed as to be rife with errors and mistakes, because both Charley and Precious are of limited mental capacity. I know you can just turn off spell-check, but even without that added feature, it just always crashes when forced to handle large documents, and not only that, it often doesn’t format the manuscript properly (page numbers, etc.) if you try to work around this limitation by making each chapter a separate document.

For my most recent project I used one of those full-screen text editors, one by the name of Q10. I then intend to combine all the .txt files into a single printed document using Scrivener, the famed “writer’s word processor” for Mac that just released a version for Windows; it’s about $40 but well worth the investment. I don’t do my writing *in* Scrivener itself, the note-cards or what have you; I just use the document-combining feature that automatically formats the end result in standard manuscript format, ready for printing or for exporting to PDF or the various e-book formats.

Word is probably best for writing high school term papers and quick office memos. As a creative writing program, well, it’s plainly obvious that Bill Gates wasn’t an English major, otherwise he would have had Jonathan Franzen’s thousand-page doorstops in mind. ;-)