Nifty Author for Windows

User Reviews

• Great word processor but won't save user preferences

  El CapitánJuly 19, 2015

  Pros

  ? Easy to use ? Elegant user interface ? Lots of international dictionaries (over 80 languages/cultures) ? Full-featured for general purpose/personal/creative writing use ? Customizable (fonts, paragraphs, styles, page setup and background, application skins) ? Document protection with passwords ? Multiple documents handled via tabs ? Supports doc, docx, xml, rtf, txt, odt, htm, html, mht, epub formats ? Visual help ? Gratis!

  Cons

  ? Won't save most user preferences ? No user-defined templates ? No PDF export ? No footnotes/endnotes (may affect academic users)

  Summary

  Office suites are not the way to go if what you want is a dependable word processor. There are some excellent fast &#38; frugal alternatives out there (Jarte, PolyEdit) that come in freeware versions with very modestly priced upgrades for those who might need additional features. They blow WordPad out of the water and give Word a run for its money, which is pretty steep. Nifty Author is a new alternative geared to personal users. It won't do everything MS Word and Libre Office Writer accomplish with aplomb, but most of that stuff are things folks will have no need of outside their office (like mail merge and collaborative work and whatever). Nifty has a severe limitation, though, which cost it 1.5 stars in this review: it won't save the vitally important user preferences. This means you will have to reenter them each time around, which takes several precious minutes doing a boring task best left to the computer. User-defined templates would be a way to overcome this limitation. The other half-star was lost due to no PDF export support. That is also a quick fix for a future version. Footnotes/endnotes are not that big a deal when Zotero is around. Ergo, if templates and PDFs are brought aboard, we'll have a five-star contender in Nifty Author.<br /><br /><span class='notifyMsg'> Updated </span>on Jul 19, 2015<p/>I submitted the above review with Pros and Cons marked with bullets. They were changed to question marks by the dork-bot, which now won't let me correct them.<br /><br /><span class='notifyMsg'> Updated </span>on Jul 19, 2015<p/>I submitted the above review with Pros and Cons marked with bullets. They were changed to question marks by the dork-bot, which now won't let me correct them.<br /><br /><span class='notifyMsg'> Updated </span>on Jul 19, 2015<p/>Dealing with this bot is frustrating.

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