Not entirely clear who all is reading -- but I should not forget to state the obvious.
You just don't need to buy Microsoft Office.
OpenOffice (or ooffice) has been around for years, is up to version 2.3, and has all the capability you
are likely to need. I just finished teaching a freshman physics course to a large section
that gave me a need to project my lectures with an LCD projector. I prepared all my
lectures in ooimpress, the Powerpoint function-alike part of Open Office.
It's not exactly alike. Some parts are better. For example, I need formulae, integrals, subscripts, and greek letters to teach physics. OpenOffice has a built in equation editor that you don't have to purchase separetely and that also allows you to type your equations rather than pointing and clicking. It is similar to LaTeX, but not identical. Too bad it's not identical, but any way it's easy to use and gets very fast after you get used to it.
Of course I do all my scientific presentations for conferences in ooimpress as well, and .pdf export is also built in.
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2 comments:
picardout,
I've been using Open Office on my Mac G5 for some time -- even though I also own a copy of MSOffice! The reason (for me) is the way that OO handles non-MS file types: PDF, HTML, & plain text, for example.
OO maintains these file types' "platform neutrality", which is a real boon when you need to share a document you've written or upload a plain text resume to a prospective employer.
Cheers,
AvH
I use OO at work on a Linux box. The only (rare) exception is when I get weird powerpunt presentations to munge. I do that on a Mac with Office 8 (or whatever version is current). I'd wager that, other than a few close colleagues, most people don't know I'm not in the M$ prison; it's bad enough to have tangential responsibility for ~20k machines running Windoze.
A friend of mine used to work at M$. I'd turned him on to FrameMaker and he was trying to do something in Word that would be trivial in Frame. In frustration, he went over to the M$ docs people to see how they'd do it. They couldn't help him: at the time, they all used FrameMaker :).
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