Best Free Vista Applications Other Vista Discussions Discuss Best Free Vista Applications in the Windows Vista forums; I still believe OpenOffice to be the most universal free office suite. It is truely multiplatform which allows linux users etc to use it with ease. It is also so ...

[crabby]

I still believe OpenOffice to be the most universal free office suite. It is truely multiplatform which allows linux users etc to use it with ease. It is also so widely used now that Office 2007 supports its formats.

http://www.openoffice.org

crabby

[felix8406]

I've used OpenOffice, but I keep going back to MS Office. Maybe because I'm more familiar with it. Now, when it comes to price, free wins every time and OpenOffice is free. I'm yet to try Symphony and it's in Beta stage, but apparently it was downloaded 100,000 times in its first week - perhaps because the IBM name behind it and because it's also free. Like OpenOffice, it provides the three most popular office applications in an open source format; documents, presentation and spreadsheet.

[felix8406]

I tried opening an Office 2007 word document with OpenOffice and IBM Symphony, but apparently the format is not yet supported. The word document was saved with new .docx Office 2007 default extension.

Although Office 2007 OpenSource format called OpenXML is based on XML, it has not yet being approved by the OpenSource international standard. Until it’s approved, and even after it has been approved, I supposed it could take a while because it catches on. My suggestion, and this is what I’ve been doing, save the files with the standard .doc extension; this way you can be sure your document can be read by anyone that has OpenOffice, Symphony, AbiWord or the many other free available programs.

[Snuffy]

Why not simply save in the old format. which Office 2007 does allow.

[felix8406]

That's what I suggested, the standard .doc extension.

[felix8406]

I haven't had the chance to fully test IBM Symphony, as it can take a while to try all its features. I did come across and article from PCWorld that provides an analysis tittled "Why should we even care about IBM Lotus Symphony?". This is a good article for those who would like to try out a free office suite, but don't know is free is good enough. The only drawback I found when using the available free word processing applications is their lack of a thesaurus. It might not make difference when writing short paragraphs or articles, but becomes almost a necessity for freelance writers or others who write to make a living.

You can find the article at: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,13...l?tk=nl_dnxnws

[felix8406]

For photo editing you can download Paint.NET, which by the way, it was mentioned by ProCookie on another thread on this forum. It’s a more advanced image and photo editing software for Windows PCs than the Paint application that’s bundle with Windows.

It incorporates an easy to use interface, ability to work with layers, frequent updates, special effects, cropping, plus community help and many available plug-ins. http://www.getpaint.net/

[ProCookie]

I have recently received an email from a reader of my blog, he works for a software company called box.net

He asked me to try out a new Firefox extention they have created. It basically stores and backups up and synchronize your bookmarks to there severs so you can download them on other computer systems.

For more info on Box.net click here

For more info on the Firefox extension click here


I have yet to try this but i like the concept and i thought might be useful to someone reading this thread oneday.

[felix8406]

I gave it a try, it works. You first need to sign up for storage space at www.box.net. You can get 1GB of free storage space. Good enough to save and share files. I've been using box.net for over two years and they have make many excellent improvements. When you install the application, it places a link on Firefox and on your storage space (see snips). Good sharing Ant.

[ProCookie]

wow i didn't know box.net were that big, my blog is getting more attention than i thought.