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khenry
For the first time in my working life it’s been more important to know the new version of Microsoft’s Office Suite rather than its new Windows OS. However, I settled upon OpenOffice instead.
With its file format capability, it’s the perfect alternative for the home with its Microsoft file format capability when you are sent documents created by anyone in an office, but you save nearly £200. I’m hardly boasting about getting away from Redmond but as time goes on, that’s when I’ll get to see Office 2003 in greater depth again as businesses normally retain the penultimate version when it is time to upgrade the whole office’s software. Despite the fact that it does retain pure MS Office compatibility, more recently I’ve adopted the RTF format, meaning I could continue working in humble Wordpad if I was really stuck, or had I just re-re-re-reinstalled Vista and didn’t want any other applications installed before the image.
When I wanted to make an emergency recording of a Minidisc because its shell developed a crack, and I also wanted a no-nonsense, native Ogg Vorbis audio player, it was Audicity that managed to do both tasks at the drop of a hat. Now that I’m helping out a mate with website content again and need to quickly resize box art and screenshots, it’s the GIMP that I’m employing for the shrinkage and it’s already had two more incremental updates since I last downloaded the program.
It’s not strictly open source, merely offered with a “pay what you want” model by its creator but anyone who hankers after the late great Adaptec CD Burning interface could find it and stick to it by using CD Burner XP SE.
Last but not least, this blog requires Wordpress-MU and no link is necessary, it wouldn’t have been chosen by CPC were it not for its usefulness when blogging.
The catch is, time isn’t included to really make the most of Open Source applications without stepping off the grid and playing around and drilling through online tutorials. One effect of Microsoft’s monopoly is the fact that its software format is aped by so many rivals.
This means that even though you could obtain superior results by learning a new way to do something, some users may choose to stick with whatever’s on the menu bar rather than diving into a readme to find something new and possibly more efficient. It’s hard to blame them if sometimes, the Menu Bar way is the tried and tested method of accessing your desired function the most quickly.
There are also some plain annoying differences such as OpenOffice suggesting a word from its dictionary, but expecting you to know that you’re supposed to press Enter to keep the suggested word, as any other key will delete it again.
However, that’s a Freudian slip in the above paragraph. The dictionary handling in OpenOffice isn’t “annoyingâ€; it’s merely different to Microsoft’s way, which has been standard since the 1990s. That’s how good a job Microsoft has done (on me anyway). However, you can train your brain by learning new ways to do things and you don’t even need a Nintendo DS. So I’ll plug away at these Open Source applications until I know them better than the sole function I needed in a hurry. As usual, I hope that I’ll get something out of these new applications other than saving money.
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