Forget MS Word, switch to Markdown

Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. It enables plain text formatting syntax aimed at making writing for the internet easier.

Why Markdown

The philosophy behind Markdown is that plain text documents should be readable without tags mussing everything up, but there should still be ways to add text modifiers like lists, bold, italics, etc. It is an alternative to WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors, which use rich text that later gets converted to proper HTML.

Markdown is Future-proof. By “future-proof,” this means for as long as plain text is the standard (which it will be for a long, long time), Markdown will be usable and openable by modern programs. Compare this to Microsoft Word, which has over 10 different file types as of 2022. Keeping things plain text ensures there will never be an outdated version, so software doesn’t need to update to keep up with the format.

Markdown does have its own filename extension: .md. It is designed to be perfectly readable as a raw text file. So it’s safe to say that Markdown isn’t going anywhere.