And Then I Was Off It….

For a while now I’ve been trying to get away from Microsoft Office. I’ve been using Office 2003 for ever, well, since 2003, but now I’m not in the world, updating, rather than being free, which I could happily live with, would now require me to spend money, and MS Office ‘ain’t cheap. At the moment I can't think of a reason why you'd want to update, but there you go. I mean a word's a word and a number's a number is it not?

I've tried all I can find, from Symphony, which wouldn’t run for me for reasons not yet fully understood, to Open Office and lately, Libre Office.

Libre was pretty cool but hell of a size and a tad slow. Slow? What ya going to do with a second start-up saving?

Anyhoo, I’ve settled on Soft Maker Office. Cost not too much for the 2012 release, but you can download and use for ever and ever the 2008 version for free here. It’s of modest size and fast. I now have many seconds a day to do nothing with and feel so much better for it. I guess that, over time, I'll have saved so many seconds that MS Office 2003 will be back in date. And the Huhnaloon back in diapers…..

Back to Soft Maker; once you drag all the menu icons you’ll never use off the menu bars and drag usable icons onto just the one menu bar you get all the workable real-estate you’ll ever need.

Any weaknesses? The spell chequer and Dina-thesaurus isn’t exactly the bees knees although the spell thingy obviously gets better as you do the adding stuff. Hoping, as you add, that you’re right. Right?

However, this weakness led me to WebWord. There’s a portable version out there also, as well, so there is, oh yes there is.

Fire him up and he sits in your task bar, highlight a word, hit your assigned hot keys, and, viola! There she be, all you kneed to no abbot the word wot you lighted highly, as fast as a flash. How good is that? No? Suite yourself then.

You'd be forgiven for believing, what with 'Web' being in there, that you had to be connected to the Web to use WebWord. Well, you'd be wrong, so there! He stands alone.

So with these two bits o’ kit I’m off MS Office with, contrary to popular belief, no ill effects, side effects or special effects.

This has been a Foggy public service posting.

Quote; Roy Blount, Jr.

“The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor' I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.'”