(2023-03-06) What Is Markdown And Why Should You Use It Instead Of Microsoft Word

What Is Markdown, And Why Should You Use It Instead Of MS-Word? Writing has become an important, ubiquitous part of our modern-day life, and having essential skills in not only putting words down but also in formatting the written word quickly and efficiently is a vital component of just about every job or venture imaginable.

Many potential formatting errors or incompatibilities are virtually programmed into traditional writing software, and then appear when you output the created document to various formats.

Is Markdown the solution to an age-old problem?

Why is Markdown better for writers than Word?

Some of the main benefits of Markdown:

Version control. Those of you who have edited together with others

Edit on any platform. There are no special apps to download

Simplicity is the key.

File Size

are there any drawbacks as well?

While being great for simple text, there are some limitations for longer writing tasks (such as creating books, for instance) where one might want to re-use organized text snippets

Inserting tables takes a bit of extra effort and there are few options for formatting them.

Inserting an image manually takes some getting used to.

When using a dedicated Markdown editor, inserting an image is a simple drag and drop affair — albeit still without viable formatting options.

there are a couple of great editors available completely free online. Three excellent recommendations here are
Stack Edit: a free, open-source Markdown editor based on PageDown.
Dillinger: another text editor that is only useable online, i.e. no downloading of docs.
HackMD: A great Markdown io for cross-platform collaboration.

If you do a lot of writing off the web

it might be a better choice to use a dedicated Markdown editor instead. Fortunately, there are plenty of these available, as well, depending on your operating system.

On the Mac side, Byword is an exceptional and quite affordable choice. My personal favorite has been iA Writer, for many years now. Another great option is Ulysses.