Free Words!
For the last several days, WordPerfect has failed to work on my computer. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it - twice - to no avail. And since I'm a) too cheap to go buy another office suite and b) morally opposed to giving Herr Gates any more of my money than absolutely necessary, I went looking on the internet for a freeware word processor that I could download.
I had a couple of requirements in mind. First, it had to be relatively small, since I still use dial-up. (Yes, I know how cool broadband is, but why pay for it when I already get dial-up included with my tuition and fees?) A spell check feature was also an absolute necessity. While my spelling and general mechanics are usually fine, my typing is often suspect. (Sorry, Mom.)
So I went to Google and entered "freeware word processor". And I found one, on which I am composing this blog entry. It's called PolyEdit. So far it works pretty well. I had to download a dictionary in addition to the program itself, but at 547 Kb and 1.26 Mb respectively, it wasn't that big a deal. It has all the standard formatting features and provides translation to and from MS Word format if necessary. It also allows for special characters, tables, graphics, and embedded objects. If you happen to be coding HTML, it allows you to preview the finished product. And of course, it's got that spell checker (although it doesn't recognize "PolyEdit" as a word. I'm not sure what I think about a program that's unaware of its own existence.) So far, all the features seem pretty intuitive. Nice.
Isn't it great to know there's life (at least to some extent) without Microsoft®?
I had a couple of requirements in mind. First, it had to be relatively small, since I still use dial-up. (Yes, I know how cool broadband is, but why pay for it when I already get dial-up included with my tuition and fees?) A spell check feature was also an absolute necessity. While my spelling and general mechanics are usually fine, my typing is often suspect. (Sorry, Mom.)
So I went to Google and entered "freeware word processor". And I found one, on which I am composing this blog entry. It's called PolyEdit. So far it works pretty well. I had to download a dictionary in addition to the program itself, but at 547 Kb and 1.26 Mb respectively, it wasn't that big a deal. It has all the standard formatting features and provides translation to and from MS Word format if necessary. It also allows for special characters, tables, graphics, and embedded objects. If you happen to be coding HTML, it allows you to preview the finished product. And of course, it's got that spell checker (although it doesn't recognize "PolyEdit" as a word. I'm not sure what I think about a program that's unaware of its own existence.) So far, all the features seem pretty intuitive. Nice.
Isn't it great to know there's life (at least to some extent) without Microsoft®?
posted by Michael at
4:09 PM
2 Comments:
Mikey:
You might also want to check out Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/). I used it on my laptop for several months and had good luck with it.
By
dilliwag, At
September 04, 2004 12:35 PM
Thanks for the tip, gentlemen. I checked it out, and it looks good! I just have to get to a computer on campus that has a Zip drive so I can download it. It's about 60 Mb, which would take somewhere in the neighborhood of three weeks to download on my computer....
By
Michael, At
September 05, 2004 9:48 AM
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