Ask A Programmer, Volume 1
Dear Programmer,
I just bought a new Gateway laptop. It came with Microsoft Office, and today it expired! I didn’t realize it was a trial, and now I am in trouble. I am a student, and need to write a paper for my class! What do I do?
~Word-less in New York
Dear Word-less in New York,
You are not alone. Students and other new-computer-buyers across the world are slowly falling to their knees at the hands of the cripple-ware installed on their machines. The trial version of Office is one such predator that often leaves its victims so desperate for its tools that they run out en masse and buy it off-the-shelf at Target. Not. Although wonderful, it is no secret here that there are some powerful, comparable, and free tools that will leave you wondering why you used that free trial in the first place.
The first is OpenOffice. OpenOffice has long been the default Office replacement for those who don’t use Windows or don’t care to. Even if you plan to use the second option (which I more highly recommend) you should, without delay, download and install OpenOffice on your computer. It is something that proves invaluable to have, especially when people like to email around superfluous Word documents. OpenOffice will allow you to view, create, and save all the same formats that Microsoft Office uses, and has much the same look-and-feel. It has it’s own tool for each of the tools Office uses, although they come with less-flashy (and dorkier) sounding names. Instead of “Excel” they have “Calc.” If OO has a marketing department, they should be fired. But they probably don’t, and since it is free, I won’t complain too loudly. Red Flag: OpenOffice is not an exact copy of Microsft Office, and often times it is only quasi-compatible with its $200 desktop-productivity-cousin. People with MS Office who try to open your documents from Open Office will sometimes experience unexpected results. I do not recommend preparing a slideshow presentation in OpenOffice and expecting it to work flawlessly in Powerpoint. I keep OpenOffice on hand for (more-or-less) having the ability to open other documents that people send to me.
Since OpenOffice cannot be trusted, where then can we turn? Google Docs. I have written extensively on the matter before, but allow me to point out what makes it so different.
Your documents don’t live on your computer. They live on the internet. But in a safe place where only you can get to them. If you forgot your laptop, or the battery dies and you need to access a file, just hop over to your school’s computer lab. Google will have them ready and waiting for you.
You have the ability to share them with other people, who can (if you so allow) edit them. This allows for collaboration.
You create, edit and maintain your files through your web browser. If your web browser happens to be Firefox, then you will be able to have your class notes or internet references open in one tab and your document in another. Its a good time.
You can export (save) your document in any number of formats, including DOC for people who have Microsoft Word, or directly to PDF for guaranteed cross-platform compatibility (this means that anyone who has a computer can view it, and it will look just the way you want it to).
Revisions. Ever have Word crash and you lose your file? I accidentally did this once in Google Docs by a combination of keystrokes which, by accident, deleted the whole file. Not good. So clicked on the “revisions” tab and simply opened up the file the way it looked 16 seconds earlier. Much better.
Auto save. I regularly hear stories of people who worked all night on a file, forgot to save it, and when then left the room for a Wendy’s run an Essay Gremlin came in a closed all open programs, including the file. With Google Docs, it autosaves. Years of training myself to hit Ctrl-S every 8 seconds, wasted. But I’m not complaining.
That’s it for now, but I hope this has been some help! Good luck, and enjoy Google Docs!