I hate Microsoft! Recently my internet explorer was having some issues (the content advisor kept turing it’s self on, every time I opened a new window… very annoying). In trying to fix it I wound up killing Outlook, Word, and Excel as well. Apparently these programs are all conected…
Now the question:
I’ve found Netscape to be a brilliant alternative for Email and Web browsing, and I don’t want to go back to Microsoft again.
Any suggestions for a good word-processor? A low-end spreadsheet/graphing program might be usefull too, but I don’t really need one - as I already have Maple6 and MatLab 6.1 - but my computer is old and running such heavy math programs at the same time as anything else can be risky business.
I’m not sure how I didn’t see it when looking through the first time though…
I checked out AbiWord, which somebody there mentioned. It works (which is more than I can say about MS right now), it feels like MSWord - so it shouldn’t take long to learn, it’s not MS - so I don’t feel dirty, and it’s FREE!
On my Macs, I use ClarisWorks for WP, Claris Emailer for email, either Netscape or iCAB for web browsing, IRCle for IRC and AOL IM for instant messaging.
I don’t know your level of computer literacy, but if you’re a good geek like my boyfriend is, Linux and UNIX are other operating systems you could use in place of MicroBorg, er, Microsoft.
You can use OpenOffice in both Linux and Windows. EasyOffice is another option as well. You can download a home version which is free. I found it to be pretty similar to Office and a decent alternative to Microsoft Office.
I use WordPerfect 8, from Corel. It does pretty much everything Word does, and for the most part, it does it better. Unfortunately, Excel is still the king of spreadsheets.
Just a possibly-important note: if you will be wanting a database, StarOffice has a crippled version of a proprietary database system, OpenOffice includes no database at all. EasyOffice I dunno nuthin about. …There are some free database systems that can run across Windows and Linux: PostGRE and MySQL are the two big ones, but neither is exactly as easy to use as Access or StarOffice’s offering.
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Yeah, I’m beginning to see that. I didn’t think I’d miss Excel, but OpenOffice can’t produce a “scientific” looking graph. It can’t take a data set and use them as uncertainty bars - and it’s regression sucks. MATLAB does an excellent regression fit to any function (and has more options than just least squares), but doesn’t produce a very pleasing graph (unless I want to write my own code in it… maybe I’ll have to).
While Excel’s regression wasn’t that great, and least it could create a decent looking graph. Back to the old-fashioned way I guess…
