DON'S FREEWARE CORNER -- OCT 2013
OFFICE PROGRAMS
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DON'S FREEWARE CORNER 2013-10
OFFICE PROGRAMS
©2014 Donald R. Snow
My Freeware Corner Notes are
printed in our Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy Group monthly
newsletter TAGGology and posted on my Family History Class Notes
webpage http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
, sometimes with updated information there.
OFFICE PROGRAMS
1. LibreOffice -- available from http://www.libreoffice.org
-- Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice
This is a freeware office suite that is compatible with
Microsoft Office, e.g. the programs Word, Excel, PowerPoint. It
handles files with extensions .doc, .docx, .xls, as well as .odt, .ods,
and .odp, etc. It has most of the basic feature that MS Office has,
but not all of the bells and whistles. The word processor program is
called swriter, the spreadsheet program is called scalc, and the
PowerPoint equivalent is called simpress. They each allow reading MS
Office files and saving in that format or else in the Open Document
formats, .odt, .ods, and .odp. I've used it to make PowerPoint
presentations, For all the standard features it does fine, but I've
noticed that some of the animation features for slides in presentations
are not as easy to do in LibreOffice as in MS PowerPoint. It will
show PowerPoint presnetations fine, however you should try your PowerPoint
in it before you count on it for a class so you know it will work
OK. Since the whole suite is free, it can be used when you need to
open a file that was made with MS Office and you don't own MS
Office. It is written by a group of programmers who volunteer their
time and efforts and is updated on a regular basis, usually every couple
of months. If you sign up, they will notify you when a new version
is available. Its name was changed from OpenOffice when the one of
the companies didn't want to finance the programmers anymore.
OpenOffice is still being produced by Apache Software and is another free
office suite and is available from http://www.openoffice.org
. However, it is not updated as often as LibreOffice is now.
You might want to try both since one may have a few extra things you might
want to use than the other. The LDS Church has started using
LibreOffice and OpenOffice on some of their computers, so they don't have
to buy licenses for the Microsoft stuff
2. Jarte (pronounded "jar-tay") -- available
from http://www.jarte.com --
Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarte
This is a simple word processor that works for .txt and .rtf files.
It is easier and quicker to open than LibreOffice or MS Office and easier
to write simple things with. It is a good substitute for WordPad on
MS Windows computers and allows changing fonts and sizes, margins,
paragraph bullets, etc., and will allow saving pictures in it since it
handles .rtf (rich text files). I use it when I write short articles
since it opens more quickly than LibreOffice and has most of the features
I need for simple things. It has formatting, margins, a spell
checker, allows using special characters and hyperlinks, tables, and
equations, has search-and-replace, and word counts, plus lots more.
There is a Plus version that is commercial, but the free version works
fine for what I need.
There is a Wikipedia comparison chart of the 20-30 most important office
suites, commercial and freeware, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_office_suites
and you may find some helpful information there. The blue in the US
Dollar Cost column indicates freeware. Most of these programs are
for use on your own computer, but a developing trend is to have the
program online so you use it on the Internet, but save your documents on
your computer. This has the advantage that they can update the
program without you having to download it. The biggest problem with
this is that you have to be connected to the Internet to access the
program to write, or even read, your documents. I have started using
Evernote to write articles since I can then continue the article on any of
my computers and it is saved where I can easily search for it. For
example, I write my Freeware Corner notes in Evernote, then copy and paste
them into an email to send to Liz Kennington, our TAGGology Editor.
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Return to Don's
Freeware Corner Page or Don's
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