Instructify

It can be scary switching to a new word processor. I’ve been using Microsoft Word so long, it’s as ingrained in my behavior as eating. So when I try a more streamlined program like Jarte (rhymes with “par-tay!”), my initial thoughts are, “But what about my mail merges! What will I do without my macros!” Never mind that I seldom use the former, and am still not sure what the latter is, exactly. But I like the idea that I could use them sometime.

If you share my irrational alarmism, then you and I need to get over it. Jarte is a free word processor that runs on the stable Windows WordPad engine, giving you a clean, minimalist interface and getting the stuff you don’t need out of the way. That’s not to say Jarte is a bare-bones program, though. It still has all the features you actually need, like spell checking and text formatting — they’re just easier to find now. That means you won’t have to scrounge through a dozen menus of tables, headers, footers, and yes, mail merges and macros, when you only want to change a font (or, you know, actually write something).

I wrote this post in Jarte and had no problems, and it didn’t hog all my computing power by tantalizing me with features I don’t use. -BILL FERRIS

Jarte

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