By John Campbell
As you know by now, WordPad has undergone major surgery and now sports a Ribbon Bar just like its big brother, Word 2007.
For rusted on WordPad users learning to handle the Ribbon Bar may be a bridge too far.
Well here’s an alternative! If you’re game to try something new, think about trying a newcomer to word processing. It’s calledJarte.
Jarte is a free word processor based on the Microsoft WordPad word processing engine built into Windows.
It has been around a while and as each version develops more and more features are added. Currently version 3.4 is available.
While it is a free download, an up market version called Jarte Plus Upgrade is available as well.
According to the Jarte website it costs $19.00 US for a downloaded version.
Having said that, the free version of Jarte is so good, in my opinion, I can’t see any reason to go for the Jarte Plus version.
System Requirements
All versions of Windows, XP, Vista and Windows 7 can run it. Jarte works with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 7.
How do you get it?
Check out their website by clicking here: www.jarte.com/download.html
Installation
After downloading the installation file, you can install Jarte directly by choosing Run instead of Save. Early in the installation process, you’ll be asked to decide which dictionary you want.
Surprising feature this!
There are eight different languages ranging from three versions of English, American, British and Canadian then five European languages.
Starting Jarte
When Jarte opens for the first time you will be greeted with a Welcome screen explaining its features.
Not a bad way to start a brand new program!
- To get to a blank new document, click the X button on the Welcome tab.
- Next, you will see this opening screen.
The Reference Bar
Jarte contains a Reference Bar that gives you on-line access to a Dictionary, a Thesaurus, an Encyclopedia and a feature called Links.
While these features are not within Jarte, the buttons provide access to specific websites.
Adding Extra Features to Jarte
Jarte’s new document screen is rather bland.
To add extra features such as Main Menu, Tool Panel, click the View button.
In this menu, there are many options. Check those items you want.
In the next illustration you will see the change to the previous opening screen.
All options selected!
Showing Button Labels
Now there’s one final feature to add Show Button labels.
This is useful when you are learning Jarte’s features. The illustration below shows you how to do this!
Clickless Operation
You’ve heard of “mouseless computing” where you do everything with the keyboard.
Well, Jarte has come up with another unusual feature; it’s called “Clickless Operation”.
I found this feature in the Options window. To get to it, click the View button.
In the View menu click the first option, Clickless Operation.
In the side menu check all the boxes.
Result: I find I no longer need to click to activate a button, menu etc. as all I do is pass the mouse over the button or menu item and Jarte activates it.
Then to cap it all off, there is a speed option Fast, Normal or Slow timings.
Now isn’t this a useful option!
So there you have it, Jarte offers pretty stiff competition to the Windows 7′s new version of WordPad.
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