Something other than Microsoft?

Dr. Hess wrote: When my main box at home crashed because THE MICROSHAFT WINDOZE berkeleying REGISTRY WAS FULL(!!!!), (MS web page: "Yeah, it does that") and it wouldn't even boot, just death spiral, I booted the box, which is, I dunno, 5-6 years old? on that puppy linux CD, then plugged in my new $90 1 Terrabyte USB drive from wally world and copied what was on the 1/4 Terrabyte C: onto the USB drive under puppy linux (which recognized the new USB drive, no problem), then did a clean install with XP and copied my stuff back off of the USB onto C: That way I managed to save most of my documents, car stuff, megasquirt stuff, etc. So, I'd say give the puppy linux a try. If it worked on my machine, which I built from pieces bought at Fry's 5-6 years ago, it has a good chance of working on your Dell. I know Dells sometimes have "issues" there too.

Was any of that in English? Pretend I am not an automotive service writer... how hard is this for a moron?

Have any of you people ever actually used Open Office? I have, and can not stand it. It worked okay when I was in college and just needed to write a paper with double space and indent. Anything more than that, it's crap.

The word processor formats things really weirdly. I have to fight with it to align things properly. It also does weird things like occasionally deciding that, no, you didn't actually just insert that picture there.

The spread sheet isn't any better. I built spread sheets to track something completely innocuous and simple for the school. I entered a bunch of names, and then went to sort them alphabetically by last name. Turns out, it won't expand your sorting across the row. So, it would reorganize one column, and not change any others. Thus making all of my data out of order.

Their clone of access is just completely worthless.

Uh how long has it been since you have used it? I use it quite often and have no problems using it what so ever. I have had no problems with formatting when taking the files onto computers actually using Microsoft Office. I think you were either using a very old version or not doing it right.

rebelgtp wrote: Uh how long has it been since you have used it? I use it quite often and have no problems using it what so ever. I have had no problems with formatting when taking the files onto computers actually using Microsoft Office. I think you were either using a very old version or not doing it right.

It's been about 3-4 weeks since I've use the word processor. About 3-4 months since I've used any of the other applications.

One of the biggest places it falls flat on its face is trying to go between Open Office and MS Office. Fine if you're just printing, but if you send a file to someone using MS Office (which is likely), there's a strong probability it will format differently when it gets to them. Yes, even if you save in .doc format.

It takes a couple days to get used to the different formatting and such but you it is still easy to use and can do anything Office does. I do agree that the formatting can get messed up sending it to Word but it usually isn't a horrible difference IME.

I use word processors a LOT - I teach highschool, and all my theory, assignments, handouts, quizzes, etc are word processed.

I used Word Perfect from dos-happy 5.1 all the way to WP11. Hated MS Office - it made no sense to me, nothing was where it made sense to be. After yet another Windows OS change required yet another version of WP, I switched to Open Office. I used it exclusively for about two years.

The computers at work, however, use MS Office, and the more I've been working with it (Office 2007), the more I really like it. So much so that I bought the educational priced version (through the School District) of MS Office and I use it exclusively. I have been assimilated, resistance was futile.

I still have WP11, OO3.1 and now MS Office on my computer, since I have my entire career's worth of teaching effluence in some sort of word processed glory.

Salanis wrote: One of the biggest places it falls flat on its face is trying to go between Open Office and MS Office. Fine if you're just printing, but if you send a file to someone using MS Office (which is likely), there's a strong probability it will format differently when it gets to them. Yes, even if you save in .doc format.

Different versions of word suffer the same issue when sending doc files to other versions of word. :)

As for the OP, open office is fine. If I share, I save to PDF.

Salanis wrote: Have any of you people ever actually *used* Open Office?

Yes, and I find it to work just fine. Especially when compared to MS Word. The formatting battles we have with MS Word at work here are legendary. It's always trying to help you with formats, changing this willy-nilly because it's decided you suddenly want things in an outline format, or with new margins. Open Office does not pull that stuff on me. I do a lot of the work in Open Office, and then send the finished product over to MS Word as a result.

I've had no troubles doing multi-column sorts with the spreadsheet. But, just like any spreadsheet, it does it sequentially, not linearly. So you sort column A, then it sub-sorts column B, then sub-sub sorts column C. None of them will sort Column A & B at the same time.

between puppy and mint, I think i can put something to gether to play with.

What I don't know is if the data acq software I want to us would be compatable, but that's if I really want to beat up my laptop. Which I do...

Thanks for the suggestions- I WILL try them as soon as I have a new computer. And I'm hoping that both will enable me to just erase the bejezus out of the last hard drive- not that there's anything on it, but just to do it.

Salanis wrote: Have any of you people ever actually *used* Open Office?

I wrote my book on it. However, I wasn't trying to typeset the book or anything, just come up with the text.

Salanis wrote: Have any of you people ever actually *used* Open Office? I have, and can not stand it. It worked okay when I was in college and just needed to write a paper with double space and indent. Anything more than that, it's crap. The word processor formats things really weirdly. I have to fight with it to align things properly. It also does weird things like occasionally deciding that, no, you didn't actually just insert that picture there.

I've had the same battles and more with MSOffice. Usually it's formatting things, where the spirit of clippy decides to go mucking with how I do things. At least with OOo, I can dig through the menus and not just turn off autoformatting, I can turn off just specific parts of autoformatting that don't work for me.

Salanis wrote: The spread sheet isn't any better. I built spread sheets to track something completely innocuous and simple for the school. I entered a bunch of names, and then went to sort them alphabetically by last name. Turns out, it won't expand your sorting across the row. So, it would reorganize one column, and not change any others. Thus making all of my data out of order.

That's because you just sorted that one column. Excel does the exact same thing if you don't tell it the columns are linked. I will say that as used-to-be Excel power user, Calc is pretty mediocre. I could never get the kind of formulas I used to use in Excel to work in Calc. If they really wanted to blow Excel out of the water, why not make each cell able to take some Perl, and have all the cell numbers effectively be variable names for their contents (and row/column names refer to that set as an array)? The power of an existing scripting language applied to the a spreadsheet would be zomgamazing.

Salanis wrote: Their clone of access is just completely worthless.

That I'll give you. It makes sense, though. I'd say over 99.99% of everyone doing anything database related on a linux box is gonna go straight to something like MySQL, SQLite, or PostgreSQL, which have GUI management offerings.

I've come to the conclusion that, besides arbitrary rules for formatting (eg school), there's usually little reason to use anything other than plain text.

Maybe it's because I'm a programmer.

I use openoffice for almost all my office needs. I haven't had ANY Microsoft programs installed in years, and my machines are much more stable because of it.

I find the openoffice word processor to be every bit the equal of Word, much LESS likely to jack things up on me, and MORE likely to be compatible than Word, which is notoriously incapable of opening files created in different versions of itself.

I find the spreadsheet to be more than capable of meeting my needs, although my wife, the Excel ninja, finds it inelegant and clunky.

And I think access is a piece of crap in itself. If I want a database, I create a REAL database using whichever flavor of SQL seems most appropriate.

Salanis wrote: Have any of you people ever actually *used* Open Office?

Ubuntu here...

Every day. I do all my engineering docs, white papers, estimates, expense reports and so on. If I need typesetting for formulas and such... I use Latex.

The Gimp for 2D photochop work

Rythmbox talks to my iPhone music repository (its jailbroken so I use SSH for all the backups and so on)

I do all my c++, java, python and other work using a combo of VIM, vslick, Eclipse and even compose & burn code to AVR processors. I tune my megasquirt with it also. There really is nothing I need a win machine for these days except rFactor, iRacing. Even the occasional need to compile a win32 app for a client - I run a vmware instance on my linux box.

Ha, I'm with Tim on just about everything. Especially the databases.

My last book was actually written in Google Docs. That's still proving to be handy because I can access my manuscript anywhere. Otherwise, I have OpenOffice for other stuff. Heck, I'll use WordPad (the super-lightweight RTF editor that ships with Windows).

But here's the thing: I use word processors for processing words, and desktop publishing programs for desktop publishing. When the books go from manuscript to layout, they move to InDesign because that's the sort of work that InDesign is meant to do. Word processors should not be screwing around with images, videos or the like. I'll accept embedded spreadsheets or other data sources, that's legit.

I'm not a power Excel user, so I've been happy with the OpenOffice version (Calc). Does just fine for everything I've needed to do so far. But I'll admit I don't ask a lot of it.

(side note: a cousin of mine was a developer on an early version of Excel. They actually built a spreadsheet that would play chess. From what I recall, it came in two versions: "dumb like truck", or "slow like tree")