I hate MS like pure poison, but....

Rolfe said:
Yes, well, we were talking about getting me a cheap copy of PowerPoint for home use. I see MS wants about £120 for it, which is daylight robbery.

I can always figure out how to get on my office Thin Client online and use the bloody programme that way. I don't suppose IT will give me a local copy on my own PC even if I beg....

Rolfe.
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http://www.microsofthup.com/hupus/home.aspx?culture=en-US

Maybe ?
 
Rolfe,

you mentioned that you were involved in HE teaching. You may be eligible to get software from pugh.co.uk. They currently have Office 2010 for £47.50. Not über cheap, but still a massive discount.

Their eligibility page is here. Might be worth dropping them an email.
 
Rolfe said:
I've been using printouts from PowerPoint with the notes pages, which are very good as hard copy - slides at the top, and then the programme formats the notes to fit on the rest of the A4 page. That would be excellent as a PDF, but I don't know a way to save in that format.
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Both PowerPoint and OpenOffice Impress have options for exporting as PDF. In PowerPoint, it's under "Save As", in Impress under "Export as PDF".

As for cheap Microsoft Office buys - you might have a look for OEM versions online. Got my Office 2007 for 50$, and as far as I know these things are completely legal if slightly toeing the licensing line (which fault would be with the vendor and not with you, anyway ;) )
 
Rolfe said:
Tell me guys, if I create a presentation and then put it online, how will it look to the average punter on their home computer?
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why not make a video of your presentation and put it on youtube? Then you could make it look anyway you want.

If your computer doesn't have any screen capture software, Krut Computer Recorder is a nice piece of freeware that will do the job.
 
Rolfe said:
WP has a fantastic feature called "reveal codes". A field that allows you to see and edit every single code in the document. So if it is doing something you don't like, you can look at the codes, find out why, and zap it. Basically the codes work very much like html - italics on/italics off, and so on.
Click to expand...

This fantastic feature is also present in Microsoft Word. Very handy little item.
 
BenBurch said:
In a decade or so, Microsoft will be gone except for it's office suite, which will have atrophied due to changes in the way work gets done. I'm sure the Apple Store will sell quite a few of them at $19.95.
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You think a PC OS that currently has a 90% world-wide market share is going to die in 10 years??

Compare that to Apple OS which currently has a 4.5% world-wide market share.
 
Rolfe said:
<snip>

It does parallel columns. (I thought I just hadn't found the right command for that in Word, I am gobsmacked it doesn't do it.)

<snip>
Click to expand...

I did a quick google for: microsoft word parallel columns

Apparently you are supposed to use tables.

http://www.zdnetasia.com/easy-parallel-columns-in-word-62047386.htm

Use a table and then inhibit the borders. <snip> Word will gray out the borders on screen. However, Word won't print the borders, which you can easily confirm by viewing the document in Print Preview.

Using the table structure allows you to easily move or even delete parallel columns.
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I saw on another site that you can tell this is how MS meant it to be done because "if you import into Word a WordPerfect document that contains parallel columns, Word converts them to a table".
 
TheL8Elvis said:
http://www.microsofthup.com/hupus/home.aspx?culture=en-US

Maybe ?
Click to expand...


Evilgiraffe said:
Rolfe,

you mentioned that you were involved in HE teaching. You may be eligible to get software from pugh.co.uk. They currently have Office 2010 for £47.50. Not über cheap, but still a massive discount.

Their eligibility page is here. Might be worth dropping them an email.
Click to expand...


Hmm, worth considering. The thing is, they're gagging to give me the lot, on these offers, and I actively don't want Word anywhere near my hard disc. Last time I did that, it changed all the fonts on my existing WordPerfect documents.

Rolfe.
 
OnlyTellsTruths said:
I did a quick google for: microsoft word parallel columns

Apparently you are supposed to use tables.

http://www.zdnetasia.com/easy-parallel-columns-in-word-62047386.htm

I saw on another site that you can tell this is how MS meant it to be done because "if you import into Word a WordPerfect document that contains parallel columns, Word converts them to a table".
Click to expand...


I realised from what another user said that this was the situation. My problem is that I have to work with an existing newsletter template put together by someone else, who has used columns because obviously columns seems like the thing to do, except lacking the facility for parallel columns it's absolute murder to edit.

Still, that's a bit of a derail. I may sneakily go in and reformat the template into a table, and see if anyone notices. (What I notice is that any job I have to do in Word takes approximately three times as long as it would do in WordPerfect, and even then the end result is often not so good.)

Rolfe.
 
BenBurch said:
In a decade or so, Microsoft will be gone except for it's office suite, which will have atrophied due to changes in the way work gets done. I'm sure the Apple Store will sell quite a few of them at $19.95.
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I don't know where you get that. Microsoft is a hardly in financial trouble with net income of $23 billion last year.

What is going to replace Windows? Mac OS? Not a chance unless they license it to other companies which will of course never happen.
 
Rolfe said:
Hmm, worth considering. The thing is, they're gagging to give me the lot, on these offers, and I actively don't want Word anywhere near my hard disc. Last time I did that, it changed all the fonts on my existing WordPerfect documents.

Rolfe.
Click to expand...

You can always choose to not install Word. However that means you're paying for software you're not going to use.
 
Rolfe said:
I began on Word on a Mac in about 1991 or 1992, but very soon switched to WP for Windows on a PC.

WP is much, much more intuitive than Word. I almost never need to look anything up, I can find out how to do what I want to do by scanning the menus, or just trial and error.

WP does what you tell it to do, not what it thinks you ought to be doing. When I use Word it's always trying to change my font or my formatting or anything else that takes its fancy. WP does as it's told.

WP has a fantastic feature called "reveal codes". A field that allows you to see and edit every single code in the document. So if it is doing something you don't like, you can look at the codes, find out why, and zap it. Basically the codes work very much like html - italics on/italics off, and so on.

The result is much more compact files, by the way. The full wordprocessed document is usually not much larger than the text would be as a simple text file.

You can drag your margins anywhere you want and they'll go there and stay there. It does parallel columns. (I thought I just hadn't found the right command for that in Word, I am gobsmacked it doesn't do it.) Although the default customisation tends to look uncomfortably like Word these days, you can soon get rid of that. It even lets you customise all your menu buttons so they have actual words rather than those stupid icons.

Did I mention it's intuitive?

It's the cat's pyjamas.

Rolfe.
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I'd just like to say that I have the same intuitive understanding of Word that you have of WP. I've been using Word since version 2, and I find it just as easy and simple as you find WP. It all depends on what a particular person is used to. You got used to WP and don't get Word. I got used to Word and don't get WP. They both do the same thing, in the end.
 
OnlyTellsTruths said:
I did a quick google for: microsoft word parallel columns

Apparently you are supposed to use tables.

http://www.zdnetasia.com/easy-parallel-columns-in-word-62047386.htm



I saw on another site that you can tell this is how MS meant it to be done because "if you import into Word a WordPerfect document that contains parallel columns, Word converts them to a table".
Click to expand...

But not the way I want them presented. MS has a very bad habit of deciding how things should look and you have to come up with "solutions" to get around that.
 
arthwollipot said:
I'd just like to say that I have the same intuitive understanding of Word that you have of WP. I've been using Word since version 2, and I find it just as easy and simple as you find WP. It all depends on what a particular person is used to. You got used to WP and don't get Word. I got used to Word and don't get WP. They both do the same thing, in the end.
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I think we had this conversation before. I thought it was just a question of getting used to something. After all, the first word processor I used was Word, though not for long. I found WP easier when I switched to it, but I thought that was just because I was now using my own computer not someone else's, and had more time to get used to it.

Later, when I moved to Windows 95, I realised I needed a word processor upgrade, and someone at work gave me Word as it was what was handy. I said fine, I'm sure I'll pick it up just as quickly as I did WP. For the next ten days my temper got worse and my language got worse, and I could happily have defenestrated the entire machine.

Finally the lab manager came back with a box labelled "Corel WordPerfect 7" and threw it at me, shouting "put that on your hard disc and SHUT UP ABOUT IT!" I was such a happy bunny with that one that I kept it until again Windows had left it behind and I found WP was on version 14.

I tried to use Word again when I needed to do something that had to be integrated with an Excel spreadsheet which refused to talk to WP. Again the flames coming out of the ears and the wasted afternoons trying to make the bloody thing do what I needed done. (This was a monthly exercise.) Finally I sat down, thought about it, copied the data into Quattro-Pro, and wrote a WP macro to do the entire job with about one mouse click. That exercise took about the same time as I'd have spent wrestling with Word to get just one set of address labels from it. From then on the job took about ten minutes each time, most of which was the actual printing.

I have to use Word at work now (I'm not the boss where I work now), and I find it very restrictive. I tend to use it just for very basic notes and things, and if I need anything more refined I take my own computer to work and do it on WP. I can either save the finished product as a .doc file or (preferable) as a PDF, that latter way I know nobody can mess with it.

So if you're smart enough to get Word to do what you want, good luck to you, but I'm not.

But not the way I want them presented. MS has a very bad habit of deciding how things should look and you have to come up with "solutions" to get around that.
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That's it in a nutshell.

Rolfe.
 
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Evilgiraffe said:
Word is perfectly capable of doing two column format. No need to use tables to achieve it.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/create-newsletter-columns-HP001226525.aspx?CTT=1
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That's not it. That's the formatting used by the template I was complaining about earlier. It's hideous - whatever you try to do in column 1 changes the layout of column 2 and vice versa.

We're talking about parallel columns. Facility in WP at least since 5.1 for Windows, which is where I started. You go into the columns dialogue box and you get a choice of three layouts - newspaper, balanced newspaper, or parallel. Word doesn't give you that choice.

Rolfe.
 
Ah, I missed the bit about parallel columns and being able to edit them independently. Yes, that'd be a massive pain in the arse in Word if you don't use tables.
 
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