I am a VERY basic computer user and feared formatting software would be nothing short of a nightmare, but within a month I formatted three one-hour teleplays, started on a screenplay, and knew how to navigate the software fairly well. The Smart-type feature is a lifesaver, and the various view, outline, and report features are incredibly helpful and save loads of time.

There are a few features that were more complicated to learn, and as an absolute novice I had some questions that I couldn't find answers for in the program, but overall - I'm thrilled with it and use it everyday.

I'd recommend this software to anyone, rank amateur or paid professional ,who's looking for a user-friendly, helpful, and reliable formatting system.

10 of 14 found the following review helpful:

There's a reason the whole world uses it -- it's the best  Feb 22, 2004
Final Draft is simply the best there is. Screenwriter is buggy [I borrowed an install from a friend], Scriptware is a joke [based on the demo I tried] and Sophocles doesn't even run on my Mac. If you follow the directions it does exactly what it says it's going to do. It's a professional-grade tool [even though I'm not a professional-grade writer - YET], it's got 24/7 help [that I haven't even come close to needing] and everyone I know uses it [and I do work in the industry]. As far as I can tell the people who have problems with it aren't using it right or they have crappy computers.

Don't mess around with other programs. This one is the one to use.

34 of 47 found the following review helpful:

App problems  Feb 04, 2004
I've use Final Draft for about 4-5 years and in terms of development as a useful app it has done nothing but sit still. It is in fact a dinosaur, a left-over from a forgotten era when computers (macs in particular) were a pain and totally incompatible. The Mac community has changed dramatically in the past 3 years. Final Draft is, at best, doing the bear minimum.

It continues to be the one app I use on a daily basis that I hate. I hate it because it is buggy, clunky and doesn't conform to MacOS standards. I hate it because it uses proprietary standards for everything (including e-mailing scripts), it fails to take advantage of Quartz smoothing, the toolbar is the ugliest thing I have ever seen, the layout of the program doesn't make any kind of sense, the different "modes" do NOT function as they should, you cannot export into an useful format whatsoever (the only way to send a script to someone is via OSX's built in PDF exporting, and thank god for that), and all the "bonus tools" like scene reports and location reports are utterly useless.

And don't even get me started on the authorization process. I have absolutely no problem with companies requiring some kind of direct consumer-producer contact to authorize that you actually bought the software but the implementation you've developed is unusable. What kind of sense does it make to ask that a person de-authorize their hard drive before they re-format it when one of the only times one must do this is when the system goes down and access to the app is impossible? I've had to do it a few times, and I've moved computers a few times. Every single time I attempt to de-authorize the computer online, it as failed. Oh, it tells me while I'm de-authorizing that everything is honky-dory, but come to find out that it's not and the ONLY way to fix it is to make a phone call. I also have no problem with the phone, but what kind of a company in a multi-billion dollar a year business is not open on the weekends!? This has happened to me in the middle of production and I had to use a pirated version to get my work done.

I could go on about the shortcomings of the app, but I think the point is made.

Beware Final Draft, your days are numbered. Linux is ready to crush Microsoft in the business and server markets because companies refuse to choke down one more piece of bad code and wait in vain for the next "security update" which will do little to protect them against real threats. Businesses are realizing that open industry standards provide them with both flexibility and insurance against obsolesce. Unless you too make this realization, you too will become obsolete.

This is by far the worst quality app on my computer, and the one I use every single day. You want to improve things? Take a look at Mellel. Take a look at anything the Omnigroup is doing, Take a look at Nisus Express (even though it is a half-ass app). Take a look at any cocoa app written in the past year, hell take a good look at TextEdit. Take your costumers seriously and support, for real, open industry standards like RTF and XML, which would make your product easy to use and much, much better.