R.I.P. WordPad — Here are two great replacements

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ISSUE 21.05 • 2024-01-29 FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT By Deanna McElveen There are dozens of free text editors claiming to be WordPad replacements. That is, unt
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Cybertooth, fisher75, WSGeo, DLivesInTexas, abbodi86

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I downloaded and opened Ableword. When I went to open a file a pop up said that it is downloading something. Then when I changed directory it did another download?
What is it downloading and why?

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That is Windows prompting to install the required version of .NET if you have windows 10 or 11. This must be allowed for the program to work.

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Attention everyone.

If you are installing AbleWord on Windows 10 or 11, you must allow the install of Microsoft .NET when Windows prompts you during the install.

Did Deanna forget to mention this in the article? Yes she did.

Oopsies and sorry.

 

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Hi Deanna. I’m an elderly user and recently downloaded AbiWord Portable 2.9.4 onto my Windows laptop. I did so because it was the only one that showed up when i looked for it. It seems to be working ok but, the spell checker doesn’t work, or is not turned on.

I’m one of those old techno deprived buggers and I do all my Internet on my laptop. I have a phone but hardly use it. I only downloaded it because I use WordPad occasionally and I know that won’t last too much longer.
Plus, I wanted something with a bit of an “edge” on WordPad.

I’ve tried and I’ve tried to find out how to get the spellcheck to work or use a plugin (?), but there doesn’t seem to be any simple solution. Should I delete the program or can I seek some “simple” and “easy” advice on what to do next?

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oldguytoo wrote:

I seek some “simple” and “easy” advice on what to do next?

I found this links :

https://joost.folk.ntnu.no/Portableapps/PortableApps%20(E)/PortableApps/AbiWordPortable/App/AbiSuite2/AbiWord/help/en-US/info/infospelling.html

https://portableapps.com/node/5182

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Thanks for your input Alex, I do very much appreciate your time. However, I’m sorry to say that the links you gave me are about as clear as mud. I have trouble just navigating around “askwoody”.

I just want a free “word” program on which I can type notes etc… and has a spellchecker. As I’ve mentioned, I think, it’s only for use on my recently purchased Lenovo Laptop with Windows 11.

Maybe I should drop the idea of trying to get a spellchecker for AbiWord It’s starting to look way too complicated for this grumpy old “baby boomer”.

 

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Both Ableword and Jarte have spellcheck.

http://www.ableword.net/downloads.html

https://www.jarte.com/

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Yep, got it, that was a neat intro to the Thesaurus program! We knead more of that in our writing.

Atom was another editor, which looks now like it has also “sunsetted,” but technically available in GitHub. Apparently used a good deal in the programming community. I think I got it from you guys at Older Geeks, and owe you for that one. Thank you.

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Help! What am I doing wrong?  When I extract “TheSage” to the desktop I get a bunch of files in a folder.  Somewhere in those files is the .exe for “TheSage”.  Is this the way it’s supposed to be?

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Many years ago I used AbiWord, but eventually stopped.  As a more simplistic alternative to WordPad, I went on to Jarte.  I don’t use it often, but it is basically built on the WordPad engine.  They have a Jarte Plus version that supposedly costs, but several years ago they offered it for free for a time and that’s what I have now.  Like some other alternatives, Jarte is a little dated, having last been updated in 2018.

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Just a little note that I have Fully Alive, running Wordpad programs in two laptops with Win XP (which I use most often), one in Win 7 (use occasionally), one in my Win 98 SE computer, and one in my Win 95B computer – still alive and running although I prefer and use the Win XP versions the most.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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When I tried to install TheSage from the download file that showed on the webpage, all I got was a list of files with an inoperable app execution.  I opened an online page for TheSage and discovered that there were two download versions: “exe installer” and “zip portable”.  For my desktop, the exe installer worked perfectly.  Thank you for providing this as well as AbleWord

 

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I had the same problem.  (See my earlier post).  Thank you for this brilliant hqack I did not think of

 

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Just curious why you didn’t mention Notepad++?   I know it opens .rtf files, but maybe it doesn’t have some of the capabilities of Wordpad?

Thanx.

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I’ve been using Ableword for about 10 years on win7 PC and really like how minimal it is.   Loaded it on 4 win10 PC machines since 2019. Then, suddenly one day in 2022 I went to use it as usual on my personal Lenovo win10 and got a red error box. Tried for a week to make it work. About 6 months later my friends Lenovo win10 did the same with her Ableword. I gave her a Dell AIO win10 and Ableword was working on it for a couple months then, error box. I had an extra HP win10 machine and Ableword worked on it until last month, after I did a fresh win10 install the error box popped up on that machine.  Now I have nothing with win10 that will run Ableword. I am using Apache OpenOffice.

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Maybe a better alternative might be Softmaker FreeOffice. You get a Planmaker (spreadsheet), Textmaker (Word) , Presentations ( publisher) and yes Textmaker has RTF read and write as well as docx, doc etc etc.  I have not been able to fault it

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