Today I finished cleansing myself completely of Microsoft Office, switching my e-mail to Thunderbird, my office applications to StarOffice and my schedule to Essential PIM, and boy was it a good decision. In addition to saving myself hundreds of megs of disk space and having my computer boot up in a fraction of the time (don’t ask why that should be), my new free software is superior in every regard I can think of to the Microsoft alternative. It’s smaller, faster, standard compliant and free.
A word of advice for those who have been too lazy or afraid to make the leap away from MS Office, do it! You won’t regret it.
Good idea.
I have firefox and thunderbird for my internet needs, and they’ve been easy to use, with great features to top it off. My MS office suite was expunged some time ago, and I’ve been using the Open Office versions ever since and haven’t looked back. The disk space is a big issue for me as I have a tiny HDD on my lappy.
Why has the authorisation command changed? And why is the special word ‘fruit’?
I changed the authorization procedure because heaps of spam was still getting through. Fruit seemed as good a word as any.
Peter.
Did you consider using ‘phlegm’ as the authorisation word?
I like the word phlegm.
I don’t mind MS Office. Actually, the program I use the most from the suite is the Picture Manager. Quite a useful program.
One thing I can never find is a good calendar program. I want something that looks like the calendars you get in the mail, and I want to be able to write on it with different coloured pens. All holidays should be displayed too, by colouring in the days just like a real junk mail calendar. Oh yeah, the *whole* year should be displayed on the screen, not the current week or month. Double-clicking a day should bring up a little note dialog box to write in.
If you’re afeter a good picture manager Courtney, you should give Picassa a go. It’s superbly designed. By far the best I’ve used. As for calendars, I use Essential PIM which does have a ‘year view’. Although realistically, month view is far more practical.