Tech: Dvorak devotes another column to his hatred of Microsoft Word. I rarely use the program myself, and agree with him that Word should be scrapped and completely rewritten. Frankly, I get nervous just installing MS Office on a computer these days. The process takes too long, when I include all of the service packs and patches that should be applied to fix Microsoft’s security holes.
What to do? I miss WordPerfect, but I don’t keep it installed. I prefer OpenOffice. It’s free and easy to install. OO does most of what Word can do, and includes a PDF converter. But I do encounter documents that require Microsoft Word for proper formatting, so I keep the free Microsoft Word viewer installed and ready for those misfits. It can print, so I can convert a DOC into PDF format no matter what.
OpenOffice doesn’t have anything like Access, unfortunately. So I go to another machine when I need to use a Microsoft database, which isn’t often. Instead of Outlook, I use Thunderbird, another fast and free wonder that handles e-mail. I’m still looking for a decent event and contact manager, though. When my cell phone contract is up in December, I may get a PDA phone.
Tags: ASP, data, free, mac, Microsoft, office, open-source, patch, pda, PDF, security
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