February 20, 2012
LibreOffice, an off-shoot of OpenOffice founded by former contributors to the OpenOffice project in 2010, has just been updated to 3.5. Several new features are part of the update including a new grammar checking tool which is included in Writer. The goal of the new utility is to check sentences for grammatical errors more accurately. [...]
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January 27, 2011
There’s a couple of decent, free office suites available these days. As well as the usual applications, cloud-based services like Google Docs make accessing your work from anywhere a doddle ““ but you’ll need a reliable Internet connection to do any work. It is for this reason that it’s always advisable to have a set [...]
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December 30, 2010
Many people install Linux on their machines for its simplicity, believe it or not. Distributions like Ubuntu and Mint target the curious inexperienced user and provide a complete suite of free software to tackle most PC-related tasks. If you’re regularly tapping away on a word processor, balancing the books with a spreadsheet or knocking your [...]
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December 15, 2010
After perusing our must-have Windows apps page, a plucky MakeUseOf reader emailed us suggesting that we put together a list for both Windows and Linux users. When I originally switched from Windows to Ubuntu I was very interested in these cross-platform apps. After more than 10 years loyalty to Bill’s operating system, I had built [...]
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July 15, 2010
As I pointed out in an earlier post about Microsoft’s new Office Web Apps, there is an undeniable push towards storing document data online (in the cloud). This puts traditional Office suites in a bit of a sticky situation. They do retain a superior interface for editing documents, but they lack a built-in way to [...]
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June 7, 2010
It’s time once again for our featured Movers and Shakers post. Each week, we take one software category and list the top ten most downloaded free apps. This week we are looking at a CNet category entitled Business Software. These are applications that you can use to assist your day to day work. It doesn’t [...]
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May 18, 2010
Did you know that Word documents can hold information that is not visible from within the document? It is true. Microsoft tags hidden data to your documents that can give information such as revision logs, identifying information (author, etc.), comments, keywords, hyperlinks, saved dates, edit dates, and much more. This is called metadata. Why should [...]
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May 13, 2010
Open Office 3 is an incredible and diverse productivity tool set. It is an open source program that offers free tools for work processing, presentations, databases, and spreadsheets. The program can be freely downloaded on PC, Mac, and Linux machines. The best part? It can open files from any other program! Read more about Open [...]
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February 21, 2010
Last week we discussed do you buy software or prefer to use a “cracked” version? We only received 729 responses which was about half the amount of responses we got on our previous poll. I will chalk the poor results up to the fact people that do pirate software are scared of getting caught. [...]
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January 17, 2010
The debate begins! Well, the debate may not even matter in a few years as the Internet and computing evolves but for today it’s still here. What debate am I referring to? Which application suite is best: the desktop applications (one that is actually installed on a local machine ie. your computer) OR web-based applications [...]
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July 11, 2009
These days, the world has become a smaller place to live in. Quite often, there is a need to translate a document or email (or conversation) of yours or one you received a colleague into another language. Most free translation tools available for such translations are scarce, not quite accurate and generally have a price [...]
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May 10, 2009
There are so many good software available these days – some free and some not free that you can use to create documents of all kinds. The downside? Each has its own format, some open formats and some not and you have to take care of which ones play well with which software. Every now [...]
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March 15, 2009
Although there are many great open source office suites, Microsoft Word remains my number one choice. It belongs to the elite few applications I’m willing to pay for in the big world of software. However, nothing is perfect. And although imperfections create the uniqueness and beauty in most cases, we want software to be as [...]
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March 9, 2009
The Wikimedia Foundation home page says – Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. With nearly 3 million articles in the English version alone Wikipedia along with its sister wikis is an Alibaba’s treasure trove of information. Now, Wikipedia gives us a chance to [...]
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December 16, 2008
Have you ever received one of those files with the .docx extension and wondered what to do with it ? It can’t be viewed in older Word versions, so how can you open a docx file then? Well I have and the last time I couldn’t open a document, I was so frustrated I decided [...]
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