Freelance Writer Tip : # 6 — OpenOffice Writer and Google Doc
Freelance writing requires some basic skills to insure that you are able to qualify for most of the project requests. One of these is the ability to submit your finished articles in HTML formating, because most of the job requests are going to be for web content.
There are only a few basic tags you need to know and understand or web content, which I have outlined and described in a previous post. There is also simple way to by-pass the learning curve for this skill however, and that is using OpenOffice of Google Docs as your writer program.
Why these two ?: What you really might be asking is “why not MS Word?“, which is a valid question, and one we should answer right away.
First off, it is not because OpenOffice or Google Docs are any better than MS Word, or because MS Word sucks, or anything like this… it is because of the simple HTML these other to provide, whereas, MS Word, creates a very unclear, convoluted mess of the HTML formating it creates, and most Blog and CMS editor programs don’t like it at all.
The editor programs of Blog and CMS programs are called WYSIWYG editors (what you see is what you get). When you copy and paste from your writing editor, into the current WYSIWYG editors used by most Blog and CMS programs, your browser will likely send with the copy, the formating which created the text.
So, if it was bold in your document, it will be bold in the WYSIWYG editor window as well.
Which would be great, if the BOLD tag that was used was <strong> this is my bold text</strong> and not the convoluted mess that MS Word makes out of this simple formating request.
However, with OpenOffice Web/Writer, and with Google Docs pages, if you block-and-copy from those screens and paste into the WYSIWYG editor window, the formating is simple, clean and won’t give your client a heart attack from what the strange and convoluted code MS Word does to the rest of his web site pages.
In OpenOffice you will want to edit and write in the Writer/Web program, not the normal Writer window. Go under File->New and choose Writer/Web for the document type.
This will save you time, energy and a great deal of frustration if you are just starting out to write web content as a freelance writer.