One of the benefits of having friends like Chuck, Jason and Roger, the other staffers over at HappyPalm, is each of us will pick up on something the others might miss in the seemingly endless search for that 'perfect' PDA or application. An idle comment on GAIM to Jason last night prompted him to give me the heads-up on a neat feature I'd missed whilst whilst installing OpenOffice.org 1.1.
Although I run a Windows PC (despite Jason's attempts to get me onto Linux), I have grown tired of being a slave to Microsoft's heavyweight and finicky applications. In particluar, I resented using resource-sapping Office suite at home as well as at work. So, in line with my desired policy of populating my newly reformatted HD with alternative applications where possible and having run StarOffice for a while some time ago, I turned to the GPL and open source communities for my replacement. Naturally, I was drawn to the leading multi-platform OpenOffice.org 1.1 productivity suite.
OpenOffice is comprised of WRITER, a powerful word processing tool that can handle simple notes to sophisticated HTML layouts; the CALC spreadsheet, data analysis and graphing tool; IMPRESS with which multimedia presentations containing special effects & animation can be produced and DRAW that can be used for simple diagrams or dynamic 3D graphics and special effects. The bundled Database User Tools help to run database work in a simple spreadsheet-like form. They support dBASE databases for simple applications, or any ODBC or JDBC compliant database for industrial strength database work.
Meanwhile, back at last night's install, I was chatting back and forth with Jason whilst looking through the new features. Amongst the documented features of the 1.1 release is support for mobile device formats like AportisDoc (Palm), Pocket Word and Pocket Excel. However, having run the typical install option, I could not find the Palm/Aportis .doc format as an option in the Save As or Export menus. As a seasoned user, Jason advised that the filters for the mobile device formats were a user-specified choice under the Custom install option and wouldn't have loaded as part of the typical install process.
One annoyance was that when I ran the setup again, the 'modify' option wasn't available or visible which necessitated me uninstalling and then custom reinstalling the whole kit and caboodle this morning (after a cup of rocket-fuel-grade coffee had brought my eyes into focus!). Having said all that, I am now able to save my text documents to the AportisDoc format at the click of a mouse or PDF format if you prefer. On second thoughts, maybe not because folks who get Jason started on his favourite subject of getting PDFs onto PDAs need a little time on their hands - the man's a demon for that stuff! :D
Posted by bignoseduglyguy at October 4, 2003 03:01 PM | TrackBack