Should You Use Online Notepad or Microsoft Word for Content Writing?

04 Feb 2025

Should You Use Online Notepad or Microsoft Word for Content Writing

Writing is a lucrative venture in 2025. A good writer is worth their weight in gold nowadays because the market has been flooded with low-quality AI-generated content. 

That’s why many people have turned to freelance writing as a means of earning more money. Naturally, a good writer also needs good tools to work well. 

Chief among them is the word processor–a software that allows you to type and save documents. That’s a gross oversimplification, as modern word processors do a lot more than that.

The discussion we are about to have is centered around the use of offline word processors like Microsoft Word and online tools. More specifically, we will discuss which one is better to use in the current technological climate.

The answer is quite nuanced and not a plain choice between the two. Both methods have their pros and cons. So, the decision ultimately comes down to your circumstances.

Online Notepad vs Microsoft Word: What’s the Difference?

Let’s start by defining offline Word and online Notepad. What are these tools, and what features do they provide that a writer wants or needs? All of that and more will be answered starting now.

Features of Online Notepad

Strictly speaking, online notepad is not one app. It is a catch-all term for all kinds of online word processors. There are many different types, and they have different kinds of features. 

However, they offer some general features that don’t exist in offline word processors. The main ones are listed below.

  • Autosaving. Whatever you write or edit it will be automatically saved. As long as your browser cache and cookies are not cleared, your write-up will remain intact.
  • There is no download or installation required. The online processor will work out of the box. However, it is dependent on an internet connection. Without the internet, you can’t use this tool.
  • Perform fast due to minimalist design. 
  • Can perform additional functions with the help of plugins and extensions.
  • Allow multiple people to work on the same document, which is great for team collaboration.
  • If you create an account, the data gets stored in the tool’s cloud. This allows you to access the content from anywhere by logging into your account. 

That last one is perhaps the best feature that will make you want to use an online notepad instead of an offline word processor. However, as is the case with all things, there are some drawbacks as well.

In online notepads, you can’t do the following stuff.

  • Create citations and reference lists.
  • Do extensive formatting and create tables and equations.
  • Be sure of security because your files are on the cloud, and that can be hacked or subject to a data leak.

Features of Microsoft Word

Now, let’s discuss the quintessential offline word processor: Microsoft Word. The offline version of Word has the following features.

  • Provides advanced spell-checking and grammar-checking by default.
  • Has way more formatting options.
  • It works offline, so you don’t need an internet connection to work.
  • Integrates with One Drive to make automatic cloud saves. This means that your work is autosaved and never lost.
  • Supports plugins and extensions to extend functionality. 
  • Provides support for creating reference lists and citations in most academic formats such as APA, MLA, IEEE, etc.

These are the major benefits you get when using Microsoft Word. Of course, using this approach does have its drawbacks as well. For example:

  • You have to download and install an offline word processor. Depending on which Microsoft Office utilities you choose, the download and installation can be quite large.
  • You have to pay to use Microsoft Word. It can be a one-time payment (Microsoft Word) or a subscription (Office 365).
  • The software can become bloated with all the extra features provided by Microsoft. This can make the software lag.

So, those are some caveats of using offline Word.

When to Use Online Notepad

Given the different pros and cons of online notepads, we can infer their suitable applications. They can be used for the following purposes.

  • Collaborating and brainstorming with your team in real-time.
  • Writing short drafts and notes.
  • Writing short-form content with strictly enforced word limits, such as ad copy or call to action, image alt-text, and meta descriptions.
  • When you need a distraction-free interface, online notepads lack the massive, feature-filled toolbar found in Microsoft Word, so they are less distracting to work on.

Just one thing to be aware of: different tools measure the number of words differently. So, just to be on the safe side, when working on things like ad copies and CTAs, use a third-party word counter to get an accurate count.

That’s one of the major benefits of an online tool; you can complement its function with that of other free online tools. So, if your work environment relies on the net or you have to move around a lot on different systems, use the online notepad.

When to Use Microsoft Word

This tool is for the purists and the old-fashioned writers. But that doesn’t mean that it's not modern. Microsoft has made this tool work very well. They even released a portable version that works online and provides most of the functions found in the offline version. However, that’s a topic for another time.

Getting back to the discussion at hand, here are the use cases for offline Word.

  • Writing long-form academic content. The inherent citation and reference features in Word, along with the varied formatting options, make it a great tool for doing this kind of work.
  • If offline working is crucial to you, i.e., you live or work in an area where internet access is unstable, then this is the tool for you.
  • If you want advanced features like built-in grammar checking and text predicting, then you should use Microsoft Word.

Conclusion: What Should You Use?

So, which tool should you use? As we said, both types of tools have their uses. So, the obvious choice is to use the tool that aligns with your use case. So, if you work in some kind of marketing firm where team collaboration and small copies are the norm, then an online notepad is for you. Similarly, if you are a journalist and travel frequently, an online notepad is going to be more convenient for you.

Word, on the other hand, is a solid choice if you are a researcher writing a paper or a novelist writing a book. These kinds of long writing tasks are easier to do on Word and have more features to support them. For example, creating a table of contents, hyperlinks for jumping to different sections, and, of course, citations.