For MAC users, Neo Office may also be worth a try.
Posted on 02/12/2010 3:34:31 PM PST by goldstategop
OpenOffice 3.2 is available for download.
Improvements in the latest release of the open source office suite include faster start-ups, improved compatibility with other office programs, and several new features (with special attention to the Calc spreadsheet program.)
At the same time, the OpenOffice.org team is celebrating its tenth anniversary and a claimed total 300 million downloads of the office software since its initial launch. They say that just over a year since its launch, OpenOffice 3 has logged over one third of those downloads from the central server alone.
(Thanks in a large part to Germans, Czechs, and Poles, some may say).
According to the OpenOffice team, 3.2's Calc and Writer components have reduced their start-up time by 46 per cent from version 3.0.
Version 3.2 also boasts improved compliance with Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 standards as well as the ability to open password-protected Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.
OpenOffice's Calc program appears to have received the most attention with the new release, adding more cell border options, improved autofill, extensions to Calc's copy and past functionality, and more. If spreadsheets are your thing, there's quite a bit look over.
Check out the full list of new features here.
The OpenOffice folk encourage all users to upgrade and remind those running OpenOffice 2 that the version was declared "end of life" in December 2009. That means no more security patches or bug fixes from the community. However, enterprise support with longer lifecycles may be available from other distributors and commercial vendors like the project's new sugar daddy, Oracle.
Cool!
This is great software.
And it’s the easiest way to convert Excel to PDF.
should a contented MSOffice user find this of any interest?
yeah but if all your stuff in in vba...
What’s nice is with the combination of Apache POI and Open Office, I can create reports in either Excel or PDF format, without even needing to have Excel on the server.
And let me tell you, it’s a heck of a lot easier to format reports and formulas with Excel than trying to do it with something like Crystal Reports (and a lot cheaper too).
For MAC users, Neo Office may also be worth a try.
I tried it and thought it was crap.
Pretty much my opinion of MSOffice, except overpriced also came to mind.
I’ve downloaded it, installed it, and tried it. It’s about as bad as M$ Word. You have little control over what it does, and can’t format the page the way you want. You have to be satisfied with the limited formatting options that the programmers thought you needed.
I’ve stuck with WordPerfect all these years. No compelling reason to change, yet.
I have an antique version 2.4 and am happy with it.
Actually, it has a lot of customization options, and formatting the page is very easy. You can make your own keyboard shortcuts, as well as toolbars, and an increasing repository of free extensions is available. But it needs to learn from Firefox a lot, as does Windows. Makes basic web pages well: http://www.peacebyjesus.com/ Better than anythng from MS i have tried.
My hear goes out to you. Was on dial-up till 2005, and it was free thank God (still is in MA), but i thank God also we could afford the $20 a month Verizon DSL.
Thank. OOo is the freeware Word Pro counterpart to Firefox. Used it from 1.1.1 i think. Praise the Lord. Useful extensions are History Master and Multi-session. I also found out from the forums on how to run a script that can change a certain type of formatted words all at once.
Once you have “Reveal Codes”, nothing else will suffice.
I really don’t know anything about them, except that you can
Go to Find and Replace (Ctrl + F) and then select More Options and check Regular Expression.
Then type (or paste) ([^ ]+([ ]?[^ ]+)+) in the Search For box.
Then click hit format and choose whatever particular format the words you want to change have (like Font>Typeface>Italic, or a certain color) then hit OK.
Then if you put $1 in the Replace With box, and or choose a Format, like a different color, and or use [i ]$1[/i ] (without any spaces inside the brackets, needed to make it show up here) or maybe [$1], then when you hit Replace All (use just Find first, and try one replacement, and undo that before you proceed further) then it will change all words that have the formatting you chose in the Search box into whatever you chose in the Replace With into what you places brackets, or italics or whatever you chose around all the all the words that have that format you chose in the Search For box.
To run a different search and replace, i find i have to hit No Format first after clicking in the Search for box, then proceed as above.
Thx. I'm also reminded that, very often, software promises (runs on any system!) but doesn't deliver. While this one may indeed, I'll bet it's not a simple command-line or mouse-click operation to make it happen.
Could be wrong, though. WDIK?
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