A Freeware Alternative to Microsoft Office

One of the most common applications used in business and at home are one of the various configurations of the Microsoft Office Suite. I’m a big fan of Microsoft Office and I’ve used it for many years. However, what I’m not a fan of is the cost of it, especially when a new PC is purchased.

I’ve recently looked into an alternative to Microsoft Office that is free to use. Free, totally. Not a limited time offer, nor a crippled version of the software. OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) has been around for many years and it’s only in the past few months that I’ve installed it and used it to see if I can avoid purchasing another Microsoft Office license.

My first reaction is that of frustration as the interface isn’t the same, nor are menu options grouped the same. Where I am so comfortable with knowing exactly where to find an item in Microsoft Office, I struggle and vent (and sometimes swear!) when I can’t figure out how to do the same function in Open Office. That having been said, I’m learning gradually and my frustration is somewhat reduced.

I would expect that there are some features and advanced functionality that is in Microsoft Office that perhaps isn’t available in Open Office, but to date, I’ve managed to muddle my way around and eventually have figured out how it’s done with Open Office.

Testing Internet Speed

When we sign-up for high speed Internet, one of the decisions that we’re making is what speed we want.

The problem is that what an Internet Service Provider will quote with their plan is the optimum speed that can be expected. The actual speed can vary – and will vary – depending on numerous factors.

This causes a problem as we don’t always know if there is a chronic problem that is impacting the actual access speed. In my own case, I had suspected that I wasn’t getting the speed that I was expecting, but I just wasn’t so sure and I didn’t really have time to investigate. I then recalled about a website which measures the speed of one’s connection. I ran this utility
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ and noticed that I was consistently only getting a download speed of 8 megabits per second, despite paying for 18 megabits per second. The ISP had investigated and determined that there was a physical problem with my line but seeing that I was in the process of moving, I didn’t deem this to be something that I needed to contend with. Interestingly enough, since I moved, I’ve rerun the test and it’s now reporting a more reasonable speed.

Why does this matter to you? Well, first of all, if you’re paying for a specific speed, you’d like to (by and large) get the speed that you’re paying for. The other thing is that if you’re consistently getting much slower speeds, it can be an indication of other more serious problems. It could be an indication of a hardware/line problem, but it could also indicate a problem with your computer as well.

Finding Files or Programs – Part II

In my previous tip, I showed how easy it is to search files or programs. Certainly, when you already know the full and complete name of the file, your job is much easier.

However, what if you can only remember part of the filename? Or let’s say that you wanted to find any documents that you had worked on with the word “Budget” in them?

Before I start into the tip, there’s a little fundamental tidbit about how Windows names files. As you know, when you save a file, typically you give it a filename. Let’s say you’re creating a Microsoft Word document called “Grocery List”. What any Windows application will do is to also append a suffix to the filename to indicate what program was used to create or edit the document so that when you go to edit this document, Windows will know if it is to open up the file in Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel. This suffix is referred to as an extension. The extension is typically a 3 or 4 character code created automatically by the application program.

To illustrate, take a look at my folder where I keep some my articles.


You’ll see that there is a column in my explorer called “Type”. This is based directly on the extension associated with the file. You’ll see a bunch of MS Word documents followed by one MS Excel document. In this folder, all of the Word documents have an extension of .docx and the Excel document has an extension of .xlsx

When you know the full and exact name of the file (such as “banana bread recipe.docx”) it’s much easier for you as you can just type the name of the file that you’re looking for. You’ll see that in my example here, the full name of the file starts with the name that I’ve given it (banana bread recipe) followed by the extension of the file (docx) and that there is a . so that the computer knows where the filename ends and the extension starts.

In those cases where you only know part of the filename, the operating system provides two different special symbols that are referred to as wildcards. Just like in a normal deck of playing cards, a wildcard can be used for anything but there are a couple of differences on the wildcards.

The first wildcard is the ? character and it will substitute one – and only one character. In other words, the filename pattern of j?n.docx would match either jen.docx or jon.docx. In English, the filename pattern could be interpreted as “any file where the first letter is a J, the second letter is anything else, the third letter is an N and the extension is .docx”.

The second wildcard is the * character and it is more powerful. It can replace any number of characters. Using the same example, the filename patter of j*n.docx would still match jen.docx and jon.docx but it would also match Jamison.docx.

Wildcards can be combined and repeated and can be at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of the filename (or even the extension if need be).

To close off this tip, here are some examples of wildcard patterns along with an English like description of how they would be interpreted.

Filename Pattern	Description
?arm.docx	Any filename that is exactly four characters wide and where the last three characters are arm and has a docx extension.
*budget.pdf	Any file with a PDF extension where there are 0, 1 or more characters of any combination suffixed with budget.
201? Taxes.xlsx	A file with an xlsx extension where the first 3 characters are 201, there is an  fourth character and the suffix of the filename is taxes.
*family*history*.docx	Any MS Word document (or that has a .docx extension) where there is 0, 1 or more characters, followed by the word family, an additional 0, 1 more characters, the word history and a suffix of 0, 1 or more characters.
F?ar?_sales*.*	Any filename that begins with an F, has one character, the characters ar, followed by one more character, the word sales and any suffix of 0, 1 or more characters.   In this example there is a wildcard in the extension so it would match any file types.
*.*	Every single file as this means any text in the filename and any text in the extension.

Finding Files or Programs

One of the features that I love best about Windows is its ability to quickly type in the name of a file or a program and it will search for it. As someone who uses the keyboard much more than the mouse, this saves me a lot of time.

There are two methods that you have type in the name of a program or a file, the first is to click on the Windows Start button on the left hand corner of the task bar and type in the name of the file or program to search for as per the following screenshot:


In the “Search programs and files”, you can enter in the name of the Windows program to run (i.e Word or Excel). You can also type in the name of a file that you have edited recently and it will bring that up in a selection list as well.

Another groovy trick is that this ability to search can be done without having to use the mouse to click on the Start button. To run the Search facility within Windows, while you are holding down the key with the Windows logo, press the F key to launch the Search dialog box.

Hard Disk Fragmentation

You might have noticed that it takes your computer longer to launch programs or load your files? One of the reasons for this is because of something called fragmentation.

The user of the computer would never notice, but your hard disk is actually logically divided into small chunks called sectors. During the life span of your hard disk, you will have added files, removed them and made changes. When you are installing a new program, the computer will need to determine where it should be located. It will look for a group of sectors that are free and will start installing the program (or saving the data file) in the first sector. As that sector is filled up, the computer will then look for the next available sector. Once it has determined the best second sector to use, it sets a pointer at the end of the first sector which indicates the physical location on the hard disk where the second sector is located. Large programs can take up many sectors with the first pointing to the second which points to the third, and so on.

When you have a new computer, the computer is able to find large numbers of sectors in the same physical region and as a result, the program will be installed in sectors that have a close proximity. The problem arises as your hard disk fills up. If it needs to find a second sector and there’s not one near the first then it will look for the next available sector which might be on the exact opposite end of the hard disk. Thus, in this scenario, you could have one program file where the sectors are scattered throughout the hard disk. Although the computer keeps track of this seamlessly, the reality is that the sensor that reads the hard disk needs time to move back and forth and the hard disk spins like a record player (cd player?) to bring the right physical location to the read/write head. When the file is split up like this, this is known as fragmentation.

To combat performance slowdown caused by fragmentation, Microsoft Windows includes a utility which can be located by clicking on the start button and then selecting Accessories followed by System Tools and then System Defragmenter. You can think of this utility as a “spring cleaning” tool for your hard disk. Once you run it, the utility will go through and temporarily move sectors to empty areas and then organize the sectors that belong together sequentially. When you first run the System Defragmenter, it will do an analysis of your hard disk to determine how much your hard disk is defragmented. 

 
This process is safe to run, and there should never be any data loss, but of course, we all backup our hard disks on a regular basis in case of emergency. Right? :)

The defragmenter can also be setup to automatically defragment on a schedule that you define. How often you should defragment depends very much on how often you install or change files, how quick your hard disk and how big it is, but probably a monthly defragmentation would be sufficient. If you run the utility and see that it appears to be fragmented past 25%, then you can always just run it manually or adjust your schedule so that it’s defragmented weekly.

Subscribing via RSS

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and it is a very common tool for subscribing to online content. This article will specifically go through the steps of how you can use RSS to subscribe to this blog. In this example, I'll give instructions on how you can add this blog as content to your My Yahoo! page (if you have one) but the steps would be similiar for any other websites that supports RSS feeds.

At the very bottom of this page, click on the link that reads:
Subscribe to Posts (Atom)



From the next page, select the service that you want to add this feed too - in this instance, select My Yahoo, but these steps would also work for other services, and then click on "Subscribe Now".



Finally, once these steps have been followed, then you will see this feed being added to your My Yahoo! content (you may need to do a page refresh to see these changes).