Comments on: Open and Save Word Documents With TextEdit

By: Brett

Brett — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:48:52 +0000

There are a number of free add on word count options. Now that I use Bean, which has a live word count displayed in every window, I’m not up to date, but I bet if you go to versiontracker or macupdate and search for “word count,” and you’ll probably find one called Word Count, another called Word Counter, another called NanoCount, maybe more. There might even be a word count Service around, and Devon’s free Word Services has a Statistics option that displays word count, character count, etc.
Some of these require you to affirmatively ask for a word count rather than having it floating there all the time, but at least one gives you a little floating window with the count displayed and updated as you type.

By: Charles Moore (!)

Charles Moore (!) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:20:07 +0000

I’m still behind with Sys 10.4 or so using Textedit and I like it. But, one thing is missing. How can I get a fairly accurate word count?

Thanks,
(a different) Charles Moore

By: allan

allan — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:16:41 +0000

i accidentally deleted TextEdit from a friend’s computer (I’m not a Mac expert)….WHERE can i find it to download a new copy?

By: brett

brett — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:17:18 +0000

We haven’t needed to buy Word to get Word-compatibility for years now. Along with TextEdit, there’s the free Bean word processor, which has all the features and simplicity of TextEdit plus a few other basic features and a nice interface; Bean will handle 90+ percent of most people’s writing needs. http://www.bean-osx.com.
You can also use the free NeoOffice or OpenOffice to read and write Word compatible files.
You don’t need an applescript to make TextEdit open Word files. As with any Mac app, just select any Word file, select Get Info (command-I), scroll down to “Open With,” and change the default app to TextEdit or Bean or whatever, and then click the little box that says “Use this application to open all documents like this.”

By: Scott

Scott — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:38:24 +0000

>>non-tech users might adjust to the Inspector>>

Technically, I’m not a tech — just a long time Mac user. If I never see another Inspector Panel, it won’t be too soon. That particular interface element just leaves me cold. In contrast, I have no problem with the Toolbox in Word 2008. To be fair, the Inspector Panel seems geared more towards the design aspect of iWork — little of which applies to me.

It seems a bit unfair to blame Microsoft for the limited Word compatibility offered by Pages, and to a lesser extent, TextEdit. Microsoft makes no claims in this department. Apple does — quite clearly in fact. More often than not, the promise of compatibility exceeds the reality.

TextEdit is a fine program — surprisingly useful. In fact, one of the charms of OS X concerns all of its included mini-apps. TextEdit, Dictionary, Stickies, Preview…clean and simple programs to handle my basic computing chores.

By: NaOH

NaOH — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 04:16:57 +0000

No idea where I got this, but this script is great with a launcher which will execute Applescripts (Butler, Keyboard Maestro, QuicKeys, Spark, etc.). Since I have Word and TextEdit on my machine, this is helpful when I want to open Word files in TextEdit.

property the_app : “TextEdit”

tell application “Finder”
set the_selection to the selection
end tell

repeat with each_item in the_selection
do shell script (“open -a ” & (quoted form of the_app) & space & (quoted form of (POSIX path of (each_item as alias))))
end repeat

As a bonus, you can simply change the listing for TextEdit in the script for other uses. I have one for when I want to open files in TextWrangler, images I want to open in Preview instead of Photoshop, PDFs I want to view in Tofu. The possibilities and convenience are great.

By: Daniel Folsom

Daniel Folsom — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 02:48:27 +0000

Adam: Apple’s Pages is part of iWork – I do use that, but the hyperlink problem described above still applies. And unfortunately those who are not technically proficient would either not know (or not remember) to fix that hyperlink bug (and regardless of whether it’s caused by Word’s bad code – Pages claims to be Word compatible, so it is a bug). And Word is THE word processor used by the vast majority, so I can’t in good-faith recommend iWork (or TextEdit) given the inability to interpret something as basic and common as a hyperlink correctly. (If this were fixed, I would probably recommend iWork, although sometimes I work about how non-tech users might adjust to the Inspector …)

By: Adam

Adam — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 02:40:05 +0000

Why not recommend iWork rather than WORD and/or Office? Textedit is a great utility, but hardly heavyweight and nor was it designed to be. I converted to Pages and Keynote a couple of years ago. What strikes me is their simplicity. Exceptionally intuitive with capable heavyweight features. Particularly strong is their object handling. What would take too long in WORD or Powerpoint is accomplished in seconds. They export beautifully. Occasionally you will find a formatting problem with Office but, sad to say, that’s because of Microsoft’s lousy code. Microsoft seem to have adopted a strategy of non-compliance as part of a bid to protect market share. IE is the most obvious candidate [ensure that developers have to code specifically for IE in a bid to frustrate everyone into ignoring FF et al........not successful], but it applies to Office too.

By: ldrydenb

ldrydenb — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:02:31 +0000

You’re welcome.

I just found this article (http://tiny.cc/eu55L) on using TextEdit as a word processor. First item is Wrap to Page, then it moves on to Styles, etc. Happy reading!

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:06:57 +0000

Genius! Thank you idrydenb …any other ‘wordish’ tips you can share with us?!

By: ldrydenb

ldrydenb — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 20:32:28 +0000

From TextEdit’s Format menu, select the fifth item: Wrap to Page. Now you have your “full page” view.

It’s not exactly the most obvious of features, is it? I only found it by experiment.

By: Daniel Folsom

Daniel Folsom — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:55:32 +0000

What really bugs me about both Apple’s Pages and TextEdit software insofar as their ability to open Word documents is how they handle links – this is actually visible in the screenshot of the Mikigo file in this article

(http://google.com – if formatted in the doc, turn into:
( HYPERLINK “http://google.com”http://google.com)

(with the latter address being formatted). I don’t use MS Office for Mac, but if I have a friend who has purchased a mac, unless that friend is text-savy I usually have to recommend MS Office.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:15:11 +0000

I actually JUST figured this out by accident two days ago! But I do have one question…how would one go about seeing the “full page” view in TextEdit? I like tha word shows you the while page contained in one window with the edge of the document clearly visible. TextEdit seems to just be a random white blank window with no visible borders. This makes centering text, adjusting margins and things like that very difficult.

Perhaps an article on ‘how-to’ use TextEdit Like you would use word would be helpful.

Good article!

By: Howie Isaacks

Howie Isaacks — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:53:14 +0000

Hopefully, this will save a lot of people from making a needless purchase.