What’s the one application I probably can’t live without? Believe it or not, it’s TextEdit!

TextEdit is just a basic text program that comes pre-installed with Mac OSX. It use to be called SimpleText back in OS 9 and you may think it’s only a text application, however it’s much much more.

TextEdit can read almost any documents. Maybe not perfectly, but it comes in handy when Word or Excel corrups a document. Just open it in TextEdit and you’ll probably be able to find content. It’ll also try to open just about anything! Sure, some documents may open up with a of gibberish, however most documents open up just fine.

Text edit can handle multilingual text, graphics, movies, and other document files. It includes spell check, word completion, and can even speak aloud an entire document or selected text. That’s always fun. It can also read Word docs, create tables, lists and work with HTML. You can save documents out as plain text, rich text format (RTF), Word or Word XML format.

The limits of this little application from Apple are seemingly endless. Ok, so it can’t do everything, but it does do quite a bit more than most people realize.