Microsoft Word (for screenwriting) Active
Where more scripts are actually written than anyone admits.
At a glance
- Maker
- Microsoft
- First release
- 1983
- Status
- Active — still developed and sold
- Platforms
- Windows, Mac, Web, iOS, Android
- Pricing
- Microsoft 365 subscription (~$70–100/yr) or one-time Office; templates free
- Native formats
- Word (.docx)Word 97 (.doc)
What it is
Word plus a screenplay template is still the most common “screenwriting software” on earth. It is fine for drafting — and every collaboration eventually receives one as an attachment. The .doc and .docx files convert cleanly both ways here.
What people are saying
The good
It is already owned, familiar everywhere, and with Courier 12 and a template it will produce a readable first draft; a whole genre of tutorials exists to help people fake screenplay formatting in it.
The bad
The community consensus is firmly discouraging: the screenplay template is fragile and famously reverts to a normal document mid-use, formatting breaks in subtle ways readers notice (margins, CONT’D, MORE breaks), and there is no scene navigation, revision markup or production tooling at all. “Use real screenwriting software” is the stock response.
Paraphrased consensus from user reviews, forums and retrospective coverage across the web.
Where it came from
The dedicated screenwriting-software industry exists because Word’s ancestors couldn’t paginate to Hollywood rules; Write Brothers’ Scriptor fixed that from inside Word and won a 1994 Sci-Tech Oscar for it.
Worth knowing
The first screenplay formatter was a Word-adjacent add-on with an Academy Award — the industry was born as a Word workaround.
Getting scripts in and out
Imports: Plain text (.txt), Rich Text (.rtf), HTML (.html)
Exports: PDF (.pdf), Word (.docx), Plain text (.txt), Rich Text (.rtf), HTML (.html)