This isn't the first post you've seen on this. And I regret that so many people are still waiting for their bags, stored somewhere in and around Heathrow.
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2008/04/02/fedex_to_sort_out_heathrow_baggage_mess/
But how great is it that there's already a song just for those who are, well, worried about the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow?
I get too much of a kick out of it not blog about it.
The holidays are coming. It's time for a brief break from the usual topic to say that I've self-published several other books, including this one, a gift-giving guide for men. (Or for anyone who needs to buy gifts for women and wants some help coming up with ideas.)
If you want some ideas for a really great gift idea for your wife or girlfriend, or you'd just like help figuring out what book or music your sister would like, then this will be a huge help for you.
I'm tooting my own horn, but frankly I think this is a really good book. ;>
Plus, it's just $5 for the PDF download!
It starts off with basics. Music and books and videos are good ideas, but how do you pick which ones? If you need a gift for someone who always goes out and buys the latest Lyle Lovett and Buffy the Vampire Slayer items the minute they're released, this can be a challenge. The book goes over how to solve this problem.
There's also the eternal issue of how a man can be successful buying clothes or jewelry for a woman. Style? Size??? You'll get guidance from this book on both.
If you're looking to be socially responsible through your gift-giving, the book provides lots of links to artisans who make stuff your honey would actually like to receive.
And if you and your honey both have enough Stuff, but you still want to give a gift, what do you do? The book provides all sorts of non-Stuff gift ideas, starting with but going way beyond the classic weekend getaway in the mountains.
I am fortunately not traveling for the actual Thanksgiving holiday. If you are, NPR's "Marketplace" mentioned a site, http://www.flyersrights.org. It's all just legislation and related plans, from Barbara Boxer and Mike Thompson. If you come back from your holiday trip with some nasty experiences, however, that is the web site to sign petitions, make calls, relate stories, etc.
It also has a bunch of phone numbers, including some reporters if you are REALLY pissed off and want to spread the word immediately.
877-FLYERS6
(877-359-3776)202-366-2220202-224-3121973-748-2132 202-906-8181214-977-8750 202-624-1819An interesting blog entry from Phil Shapiro on whether Linux is desktop-ready.
http://blogs.pcworld.com/communityvoices/archives/2007/10/linux_not_ready.html
"Our public library has been offering these Linux public stations for the past 3 years. People come up to me and ask, “What does Linux look like?” and I answer them with a gentle smile, “The computer you've been using for the past two hours is Linux.”
Kids love using the OpenOffice draw program to add speech bubbles (also called “callouts”) to funny animal photos from the Internet. People edit their photos using The GIMP. Seniors write their memoirs on our computers. One woman who uses our computer center has 17 great grandchildren...."
Here’s a summary of the features from the 2.3 new features list that I considered the most useful or important to write about. This page http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/New_Features_2.3 about the new features is an excellent guide, as well.
General
This is
convenient for anyone who prints to multiple printers, all over the
world. You can load or ignore the printer settings for your
documents. This means you don’t end up accidentally printing to
the printer in building 4 which is on the opposite side of the
country, just because you were on a business trip there last week
and that’s where you last printed your document.
If your document isn’t wider than the OpenOffice.org
window, then it will be centered in the window, not left-aligned.
Lots of locale information was added, for locations such as
Tagalog, Frisian, and Hausa.
Writer and Web
The HTML editor now has a preview feature. Choose File > Preview in Web Browser and the document opens in the default browser.
I love this feature. You know how when you get a hyperlink
but then want to retype it or reformat it, but clicking on it takes
you to the target of the link? No more. You can select hyperlinked
text all you want; you now have to Ctrl Click to open a link. This
is very nice.
The notes say that there is a new compatibility option on
Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org Writer > Compatibility: Do
Not Justify Alignment in Lines Ending With Manual Line Break.
However, I’m mentioning this because I couldn’t see it. The
illustration shows the compatibility options that are there.
When you open the Styles and Formatting window (Format >
Styles and Formatting), you can set what kinds of styles you wanted
to see: Applied, Custom, Automatic, etc. Previously, you had to
reset this every time you opened a new document or re-opened
OpenOffice.org. Now, thankfully, that category will stick. The
setting is saved per application. However, the choice you make for
Paragraph, Character, Frame, List, or Page doesn’t stick.
When you right-click on text, you used to see Default as one
of the options. Now you see Default Formatting, which is clearer.
(Default Formatting is a great way to just clear out any extraneous
formatting and apply the default style to the selected item.) This
is a very nice feature regardless of the text; for one thing, it’s
the best way to remove the hotlink from a URL.
A new export filter lets you export to MediaWiki format. Choose File > Export and select MediaWiki in the file format list.
Calc
This is a very, very smart change. By default, the
print options for Calc are now set to Print Only Selected Sheets and
Suppress Output of Empty Pages. If the Print Only Selected Sheets
option is enabled, the Calc page preview shows only the displayed
sheet and the message “There is nothing to print.” To change
these options, choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org Calc >
Print, or choose File > Print and click the Options
button.
Here’s another very smart change that will screw up
all my documentation. :) The SUM icon on the main Calc toolbar has
changed. Now you can select the range of numbers to add, click the
SUM icon, and get the total in the first cell below the selected
range. Phew. But if you liked it the old way, it still works that
way, too.
Graphics can be linked to macros. This should help with Excel
compatibility.
The Excel export filter now handles the cotangent functions COT, ACOT, COTH, and ACOTH.
Calc now supports inline matrix/array constants in formulas. An inline array is surrounded by curly braces '{' and '}'. Elements can be each a number (including negatives), a logical constant (TRUE, FALSE) or a literal string. See this link for more detail. http://sc.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=features&msgNo=230
You can now use dynamic ranges, rather than absolute ranges
defined with $, in lists in Data Validity. Choose Data >
Validity, and under the Criteria tab select Cell Range from the
list.
The GETPIVOTDATA function returns a result value from
a DataPilot table, so it can be used in a cell formula. 
Mail Merge, Databases, and Forms
The infamous checkbox on the print message when you
print a mail merge document, Do Not Show Warning Again, is gone.
Phew! See this blog http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/10/how_to_get_the_.html
for why that caused problems.
This is nice. When you choose File > Print with a mail
merge document, in the Mail Merge window, you can choose to save the
document as separate documents or as one document.
Unfortunately, in Base there is still no File > Export or File > Import feature. File > Export does appear, but it’s dimmed.
Boy, if this isn't the ULTIMATE case of "when God closes a door, he opens a window", I have NO idea what it would be.
I thought it was amazing when Gore when the Oscar. But now, he's won the Nobel Peace Price, too.
What a year, eh? Tipper, I hope he isn't too insufferable around the house.
And in the larger picture, for all of us, this is nice to look at. There's more than one way to do what you love and achieve something great. (Of course, working hard for over thirty years on something you believe in, in the face of less-than-wild enthusiasm helps, too.)
I found this extremely funny. Perhaps an accurate if not inspiring slogan for the UK would be "Extremely funny in a bitter, witty way about our idiosyncracies, and many of us still remember our Latin."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/magazinemonitor/2007/09/the_friday_challenge.shtml
I've been keeping an eye on my blog odometer and wanted to mention that just a couple minutes ago my blog hit half a million total views. Small potatoes for the likes of, say, Lifehacker.com, but it's a milestone nonetheless. Thanks to everyone who comes by to look, and to everyone who links.
Solveig
Or is it an outpost on mankind's farthest frontier?
http://www.wired.com/science/space/magazine/15-06/ff_space_nasa
Gregg Easterbrook, the author of the article, was just interviewed on NPR and was hilariously and delightfully candid.
Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke (aka Rageboy) have posted a coordinated statement.
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/04/updatejoint_sta.html
http://www.rageboy.com/statements-sierra-locke.html
Chris says, among other things:
"Misogyny is real -- and vile. Violence against women is wrong. It must not be tolerated. This issue should be explored and discussed, not swept under the rug, not rationalized away."
Thank you, Chris.
He appears not to acknowledge any responsibility for letting stand the horrifying posts about Kathy and others that, almost certainly, were made by someone with author privileges his blog. (It was a blog with several authors.)
From Kathy:
"However, Chris and I (and others) still strongly
disagree about whether people who are respected and trusted in our
industry (like the three of them) are giving tacit approval when they
support (though ownership, authoring, and promoting) sites like
meankids and unclebob."
Half a loaf, at any rate. And kudos to both of them for switching to talking (in person and on the phone), not flaming.
I haven't seen Kathy in a month or so and she's kind of busy right now. So to do what I can to be supportive and comforting, here's a big public cyberspace hug to try to visually offset the nasty stuff.
I am going to go out on a limb (a big, 100-foot thick limb) and say that the things my friend Kathy has experienced go WAY beyond what we want to allow in a "trolls will be trolls" free speech world. Also, as she says, death threats are actually against the law too. Just as no matter how funny you think the bomb joke is at the airport -- yep, actually saying it is against the law.
So no matter what kind of nasty hatred is bubbling up inside of you, you don't Photoshop her picture with a noose, and you don't make horrible comments about wanting to kill her, laced with violent sexual language.
Here's her post about everything that's been happening.
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/as_i_type_this_.html
Slashdot is talking about it.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/27/174231
The BBC is talking about it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6499095.stm
Thomas Duff has an excellent post on the subject, on the ludicrousness of sayin it's all OK because it was just the virtual, online persona who does this.
http://hostit1.connectria.com/twduff/home.nsf/d6plinks/TDUF-6ZQEXN
Here's an EXTREMELY justified post from Michelle Malkin, saying where was everybody and their outrage when someone posted this comment. http://www.haloscan.com/comments.php?user=atrios&comment=114610797516989866#7765885
"Let's sexually torture, rape, murder and dismember the Malkin family."
Here's Michelle's post.
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/007191.htm
Here's Jeff Goldstein's site. He went through some real nastiness with someone who also made threats.
http://www.proteinwisdom.com/
Here's some background from Michelle.
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/005507.htm
You might wonder why someone like Kathy who talks about how to make great products would be the target of something like this. Or how someone could start typing these awful things about anyone else and not have common sense and decency step in and stop them from at least clicking the Post button. It's tempting to say that it's just crazy, that these people are mentally ill, but I think that excuses him, or them. I think they're awful people, period, who know it's wrong but do it anyway. I think we should hold people responsible for their actions.
You might also think, "That's just the way it is. The online world is full of shitheads. Kathy should just ignore it."
Bullshit. That is the way it is, yes, but since when is accepting a current situation that is hateful, the right thing to do? At various points people have used the same rationale to argue that people should just accept racism, sexism (an element of the attacks on Kathy), and a thousand other issues. Would you want your mother or your daughter or your sister to see herself with a noose around her neck and for someone to email her saying this?
"fuck off you boring slut... i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob"
No? Then it's something to fight against, not accept as inevitable. Fight with what? Take comments like that off your blog. Criticize rather than ignore people who do it. Etc.
Kathy's a wonderful, supportive friend. I was her maid of honor. She fed me ice cream and gave me top-quality girl talk the night I broke up with my ex. She can't get going in the morning without her coffee; plays poker but always thinks a straight should be higher than a flush; has a lovable but less-than-bright dog; goes to music festivals; and loves her job.
The people who think they should be able to say these things aren't going to say "Oh, was that wrong? I'm sorry." They're going to continue to be trolls, by and large. But the rest of us can take the stand that it's wrong to threaten to slit people's throats and torture them, and refuse to tolerate it.
http://onlineprojects4teachers.com/wordpress/?p=208
Hey, in 20 years we turned smoking from something cool to something disgusting. Public opinion is powerful, and it's a power that can be used for good.
From the always useful Lifehacker.com: putting a DVD on your Ipod.
http://lifehacker.com/software/ipod/alpha-geek-copy-dvds-to-your-ipod-235150.php
I got one from Christmas and have yet to really get goin' with putting things on it. I tried but -- well, there were various technical and interpersonal issues.
Life has calmed down a bit, I'm kind of shoveled out, I've had a good week of training for a great client in Irvine, and I feel back and ready to blog up a storm.
I've recently started teaching Thunderbird and Firefox, so I'll be blogging on those as well as 2.1 features and the usual array of things I think are useful, hard to figure out, or otherwise notable.
Thanks for waiting, and I'll try to get to all those emails I haven't been able to respond to yet.
Solveig
Man, it's snowy here.
Don't even think about trying to fly to Denver before the 23rd, preferably the 24th. And of course don't even think about driving. Everything is shut down. No flights, no mail delivery, no busses. There's 1-2 feet of snow on the roads.
Of course, since I used to live in Fargo and liked being snowed in with my cats every so often, this is great. I get to catch up on work, watch (re-watch) a few Buffys, and my friend Larry lives just around the corner so we're going to get together and do something tonight. Thank goodness the electricity and internet are still going.
Here are some pictures. Click each to see a bigger version.
My door is about 18 inches above the ground, with two steps leading up to it. When I open the door, the snow is HIGHER than the bottom of the door.
Here's the front of my house, the garage door. Note how much higher the snow is, and the cool overhanging snow eaves.
Here's a full size garbage can, dwarfed by the surrounding snow.
Here are some cars.
There's no place like home.
It's almost like I clicked my airport-friendly slipon black shoes together and said it three times.
I've got my cats, NPR is on all the time (Colorado has amazing NPR, we get it all except Selected Shorts), and it feels good.
I'm glad to be home because I've been all over the place. Home to care for my mom, of course, plus lots of wonderful training gigs with great clients. I've been training on Bainbridge Island and then, for two weeks, the City of Largo. Both beautiful places, and may I just say that the Bellview Biltmore hotel in Clearwater is amazing. If you are traveling to the Tampa area, by all means stay at that hotel. I got a good deal as a business traveler, through Orbitz, but I don't know of any reason not to contact the hotel directly.
One new class in Largo was a one-day databases class, covering the topics I've written about in various TechTarget articles. My new Databases workbook covering tools in OpenOffice Base for queries, views, reports, joins, etc. is the basis for the class. Don't buy it just now -- I need to update it with a few cool new things I learned while teaching it. I'll announce when it's updated, should be by the end of the week.
While in Largo in the evenings, sitting by the gorgeous Belleview Biltmore pool and looking at the palm trees, I pondered and concluded and planned about various things. Here's what I came up with.
1. I'm going to start selling my workbooks via PDF--once I figure out the best way to do it.
The price of course will be lower, though of course there might be some printing costs for each customer. I'm in the process of figuring out how best to do this; candidates are www.lulu.com and simply setting up some PDF security, possibly a password, and sending them directly.
Question: How annoying would it be for you to have to type in a password every time you open a PDF? It would be something reasonably obvious to you, not au7781fflk or anything like that.
If you want to see lulu.com, you can see my Gift-Giving Guide for Guys there. It's a $10 PDF of my self-published guide to good gift ideas for men who would like some help coming up with the ideas. You can see an excerpt on the page with the book, covering not just good ideas but how to come up with others based on what your sweetie is generally interested in.
2: I'm going to be promoting the idea of a site license for the workbooks.
If you're looking at OpenOffice.org for your organization, and you need workbooks, please contact me about a site license for the workbooks you'll need to train users. This applies if you're going to be doing the training yourself or bringing me in to train some or all users. It's economical and convenient; you can put the PDFs on your internal web site (without a password) and let any internal users access them.
3: I'm going to be giving a particularly good deal on site licenses to schools (K-12).
I haven't figured out the details yet, but for a limited time I'm going to be putting the training materials "on sale" to promote the use of OpenOffice.org in schools. Stay tuned!
4: I want to hear about more projects that you're having trouble with, so I can write about how to do them.
For instance, I approached the idea of a tri-fold brochure for the City of Largo. (More on that in an article for TechTarget.) If there are other tasks, rather than specific features, that you'd like information and/or templates for doing, let me know.
5: I'm open for business, to help convert your problem documents.
A lot of documents open up in OpenOffice.org with no or few problems. But for the stubborn ones, it can be most efficient to just farm out the conversion. If your manual on policies nad procedures started out in WordPerfect in 1985, and has been touched by at least 30 people since then, some of whom aren't highly skilled desktop publishers, it's not just a simple case of File > Open. Contact me for a quote, if you'd like me to help convert those.
That's my plan, or at least key elements of it, going forward. I'll also be back to blogging as normal, and writing articles for TechTarget.com.
Regards,
Solveig
Hi all,
Life has reared its head again so I'm going to be dealing with things for a couple weeks. More goodies when I return.
Solveig
(Originally posted in October 2005.)
Note: Here's a related article I wrote for TechTarget.com.
What's better, software that does what it thinks you want, or software that does what you tell it to?
If it's rocket-launching software, and I don't know much about rocket-launching, I guess I would let the software do what it wants. However, I know what I darn well want my office suite software to do. I know how I want it to behave. I know what features I want and I know, for instance, that I do not want it suggesting to me what word I am typing and offering to help me finish the arduous task of typing it.
OpenOffice.org has its default behavior and default settings just like any other software but is very cooperative in letting you customize those behavior and settings the way you want them. Which is refreshing. You just have to tell it how to behave.
So I've put together a list of the top customizations I think are the most helpful and/or powerful. I make sure that everyone in my classes learns these by lunchtime, and review them afterwards. When the software behaves the way you want, that makes everything better.
(By the way, this is a little bit off topic, but I wanted to mention that the scroll graphic at the top of this blog is a drawing shape in OOo 2.0. I'm a bit of a giggly schoolgirl when it comes to the OOo drawing tools, especially the new 2.0 features.)
1. Turn off the word completion.
I hate word completion, and it’s really easy to turn off. Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click on the Word Completion tab. Make sure the Enable Word Completion option is unmarked, and click OK.
2. Turn off any automatic formatting that you don’t want.
Would you let people live in your house who you didn’t know? Then you don’t want automatic formatting going on that you don’t understand. Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click on the Options tab. Unmark everything except the top option, Use Replacement Table. Then go back through and see if you really want anything.
(You can unmark the Use Replacement Table option too....but that table is handy, as you'll see in the next item.)
3. Use the automatic formatting to create handy shortcuts.
The same tab where you turned off word completion has a really great feature for creating shortcuts. Let’s say you type the word supercalfragilisticexpealidocious a zillion times a day, or your name and title, or anything kinda long. You can set up a shortcut for it. It's a much more reliable approach than word completion.
To do this: Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click on the Replace tab.
A. In the left-hand field type your shortcut like sig and in the right-hand field, type the word you’re tired of typing all the time.
B. Click New, then click OK.
C. Click the Options tab and be sure that both checkboxes for the top item, Use Replacement Table, are marked. That just means "use the stuff in the Replace tab."
D. In your document, type the shortcut, followed by a space, and your word will appear.
Note: You can also delete anything in the Replace tab that you don't want.
4. Display the icons that you want.
There are a zillion icons in OOo as with any software and you probably don’t use all of them. There’s also that dandy little result of having to click on the black arrow to get to the icons you want, while the ones you do want sit there taking up space and, quite frankly, smiling a bit smugly. So take off the ones you don’t want, leave room for the ones you do want, and add some other ones.
First step is to take off the ones you don’t want. Click on the dropdown arrow and choose Visible Buttons. Find the icons you don’t want, like double spacing, and select them. That’ll remove the checkbox by them, and that removes them from the toolbar.
Now add the icons you want. The first thing to try is to click the dropdown arrow again and choose Visible Buttons. If the icon you want is there, select it and it’ll appear.
If the icon you want isn’t there, click on the dropdown arrow again and instead of Visible Buttons, select Customize Toolbar. Find the toolbar you want to add icons to. Click Add, and in the window that appears just keep looking through the categories on the left til you find the feature you want in the list on the right. Select it and click Add.
Back in the customization window, you can leave the icon as is and just click OK, or change the icon by clicking and holding down on the Modify button and choosing Icon.
5. Get to know the choices under Tools > Options.
Choose Tools > Options, and you’ll see the big fat configuration window. Just as the items under Tools > Autocorrect were about default behavior, Tools > Options is about default settings, default values. Anything about the program, from icon size to language settings to where the program looks when you choose File > Open, is set here.
I suggest that you open the OpenOffice.org (or StarOffice as in this illutration) item at the top, then select Paths, and change the values for any paths you use a lot. Change the My Documents item, for instance, to change the default for where OOo tries to save documents. You’ll save a lot of time scrolling around in your Save windows.
To change the path, select it in the window, click Edit, and just point to the new location.
You might also want to expand the StarOffice Write item, select Default Fonts, and choose the ones you prefer.
When you’re done, just click OK.
You can turn off the Save for Autorecovery feature if you want--or increase the save interval
I find this feature entirely un-annoying, but you can turn it off easily if you want. Autorecovery means if OpenOffice.org crashes or you have to coldboot your machine, at least you'll have something recent to return to. If you're hypervigilant, increase the interval to every minute or 5; if you don't care about it, set it to every hour or just turn it off.
Choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Load/Save > General. You're looking for the Save AutoRecovery Information Every option. Unmark it, or change the interval.
Click the thumbnail below to see a bigger image of the window.
Now OOo is more like a well-behaved pet and less likely to jump up at you, licking and biting inappropriately.
Those are not all the configuration steps you can do, by a long shot. But I like them, and students seem to like them. And they're an important set of steps in the general process of showing that OpenOffice.org does what you tell it to do.
First published March 2006
I don't know if you remember in the 90s, the thing on the Mac that let you define all sorts of wacky error messages on your friends' computers. “The radiation shield on this Macintosh has failed. Please step back five feet” was the default, I believe.
Well, it might not have the same impact, but you can do the same kind of thing in OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheets.
Pranks of course are great but you can actually use this Calc feature for good, useful, pure and high-minded purposes as well. You can do online help, error messages, data entry lists, restrict the maximum characters in the field—and so much more.
Let's say you're in charge of creating all the forms people fill in. Obviously, sometimes they fill them in wrong. You can build in business logic, i.e. you can set up the spreadsheet so they can't fill it in wrong. Or you can at least make it a lot harder.
Window Walkthrough
Select one of the cells in your spreadsheet and choose Tools > Data Validity ( in 2.0.1 and earlier) or Data > Validity (in 2.0.2 and later). Take a look at the first tab, Critera. You can restrict entry in that cell to whatever is listed here.
Then to enforce what you specify here, go to the Error Alert tab and set up your error message.
If instead of controlling what's entered, you just want to provide guidance, then it's time for input help. Select the cell or cells, choose Tools > Data Validity ( in 2.0.1 and earlier) or Data > Validity (in 2.0.2 and later), then go to the middle tab, Input Help, and enter some information help that's displayed when users select the cell.
Sample Procedure Using Criteria, Input Help, and Error Messages
Here's what I did with a sample spreadsheet.
In this sample, customer service representatives have a simple form they need to use to enter customer service Incidents.
In the date field, I've observed that people enter the current date rather than the date when the customer service indicident occurred. So I'm going to offer a little gentle help for what to put in the date field. I selected the Event Date field where the date goes, chose Tools > Data Validity ( in 2.0.1 and earlier) or Data > Validity (in 2.0.2 and later), and clicked the Input Help tab. I typed in some information for users to see, and clicked OK.
Here's what that help looks like when someone selects the field.
The next field, Customer Type, is easy since there are only three types of customers. The customer service reps don't always remember this correctly, though, or they like to make up their own types. Therefore I decided to create a data entry list. I selected the field where the customer type goes, chose Tools > Data Validity ( in 2.0.1 and earlier) or Data > Validity (in 2.0.2 and later), and clicked the first tab, Criteria. I selected List, then just typed the items in the list, pressing Return after each. Then I just clicked OK.
Here's what the list looks like in the spreadsheet (sorted alphabetically).
The Description field, which is several cells merged together, is of course for the description. I want a short description, though, and the customer service reps go ON and ON and ON..... So I'm limiting the description to 100 characters. I selected the field where the description goes, chose Tools > Data Validity ( in 2.0.1 and earlier) or Data > Validity (in 2.0.2 and later), and clicked the first tab, Criteria. I made the indicated selections to accept a maximum number of 100 characters.
Then I clicked the third tab, Error Alert, to enforce what I've just done, and created a Stop error message. I typed the title and the message, and clicked OK.
Here's what the error message looks like when people type in too much text. It appears after users tab off the cell.
Here's what the whole spreadsheet looks like now.
That's about it. This is a pretty powerful and flexible feature; I haven't shown you much of the Criteria tab at all, so go ahead and take a look at that a little more if you find this feature interesting. With some imagination you can come up with a lot more applications for it than I have here.
Karim sent me links to these dandy screen shots. Yes, the glamorous soap opera "Desperate Housewives" uses Linux and OpenOffice.org when they shoot computer screens.
Alias episode 212 with OpenOffice Writer
Click to see it bigger.
Desperate Housewives episode 220 with OpenOffice Calc
Click each to see it bigger.
See also the post on "House", Linux, and OpenOffice.org
Office suite software isn't really all that important.
What's important is pretty much anything else. What your organization is doing: research, services, saving lives, preserving order, education. Preserving the rain forest. Rebuilding New Orleans. Job retraining. Heck, you could argue that a good pumpkin pie is essentially more important than software.
OK, the office suite software helps you do all those things I listed and a million more. But I want to point out that our goal in our eight hours a day is not to use software. It's everything else.
All right. So now think about this.
OpenOffice.org is free.
Other office suites are not.
You switch to OpenOffice.org, and you or your organization is suddenly not spending $500, or $50,000, or $5 million on your office suite licenses.
Add up all the other people or organizations who are no longer spending that money on an office suite, and suddenly we're into some serious cash.
Think about how much your city police force spends on office suite software, and about how that money could probably do some good if it were spent on, say, salaries for additional police.
Think about what that research facility down the road spends on software. Compared to the money they spend for their equipment, maybe not much, but it's money probably better spent on upping the salaries for a few poor post-docs than on office suite software.
Think about how much money the federal government spends on office suite software. Now fantasize about how you would redirect that money if you were in charge.
(Almost makes $4,000 toilet seats pale in comparison, doesn't it? OK, toilet seats are already white, but you know what I mean.)
Amazon saved $17 million when they switched to Linux. Same principle--pay less for something that's not part of your core business.
Think about how much your state spends on office suite software for schools, and how many more teachers and books that money could buy.
A lot.
Education is one of the most important places to think about OpenOffice.org. Education is, to put it mildly, important. Plus, third graders aren't likely to complain that they're used to how Word does styles and they don't want to switch. They're open to anything new. And education isn't exactly overfunded. I live in Colorado which is either 49th or 47th in the nation in funding for education.
For educators, here's an interesting article on trends this year, including OpenOffice.org.
For anyone thinking about upgrading to Vista, here's an important blog. Dave Rosenberg states that Vista gives you an opportunity to really compare the actual cost and the actual benefits, and he quotes Jon Oltsik from Enterprise Strategy Group."
So just think about the value. Think about how much money you're spending on your office suite, and what you could do with that money that would be more important.
