Vocal Voices

We should all know by now about free Anti-virus and firewall software - some of it very good indeed. The same applies to malware removal tools such as Malwarebytes and CCleaner.

So, with very little outlay, £0, we can protect ourselves and clean up some of the mess we get into - providing that we are not too maverick with our Internet use.

But what about other things?

When we buy a new computer (laptop, tablet) we often get a trial period of Microsoft Office software, but to buy the real deal can cost almost as much as the hardware, so what are the alternatives?

Our children (grandchildren, nieces and nephews) may find that they have to present their work to school/college electronically. What happens when the MS trial runs out? Thankfully there are free alternatives for those of us who cannot afford MS software.

Let's be honest. Industry uses MS software - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. It has become the 'de facto' standard software, despite industry standards, and works seamlessly between different programmes, so what happens when the trial runs out? Here are a few ideas.

For office suites there are: http://www.libreoffice.org/ http://www.openoffice.org/ http://www.kingsoftstore.com/ http://www.ssuitesoft.com/ http://freeoffice.com/ They are all compatible with MS Office, but Freeoffice renders documents more correctly.

When it comes to e-mail there are lots of choices. Many of you will have heard of Thunderbird, but I would suggest: https://www.fossamail.org or http://download.cnet.com/EssentialPIM/3 ... tag=button for those with many e-mail accounts. They have To-dos and Tasks/Events and a calendar. For only a few accounts http://www.emclient.com/download only allows two accounts, but still has events/calendar.

So, if you need alternatives to MS, for whatever reasons, go have a look. Just remember that when you save your work save it with regular MS file types: doc, docx, xls, ppt, and so on, then everyone can share.

Fairly sensible. They all have their good and bad points.

I guess the question is "what are your needs". If your needs are for simple documents which can be sent in office compatible formats and for simple email tools, then why pay for them???

If you have old Lotus SmartSuite documents you can edit them with IBM Lotus Symphony, but it's hard to get now as IBM have dumped support for it. Symphony (IBM), was free but is now hard to get and was a fork of the OpenOffice product. So it's also compatible with OpenOffice as well as MS documents and the old SmartSuite docs. Especially the utterly DIRE Lotus WordPro which superseded Ami Pro.

I use GMX for my eMails, and am very pleased with it.

For antivirus I use Avast, Free, which seems to be OK, if you ignore the frequent
attempts to get you to spend money on upgrades.

Suff wrote:I guess the question is "what are your needs".

Oh, definitely. My thinking was from days at Uni and as a teacher. Almost everything needs to be computer generated nowadays and not everyone can get hold of/afford MS Office. Quite a few cannot afford computers to run a lot of the more modern suites as they were intended. And a lot of us mere mortals often get forms from the likes of insurance companies and government in formats our old software does not understand.

Most of those I listed will cope with most things, though having used a few my favourite, for presenting things as they were produced, is SoftMaker FreeOffice.

The only thing missing for students is a desktop publishing suite. Many school pupils have to present flyers and menus, etc. and Scribus http://www.scribus.net is the nearest I can think of.

Aggers, GMX is web based e-mail, and it is very good, I use it, but some of us old dinosaurs still like to download our e-mails as a sort of belt-and-braces backup. Essential PIM and FossaMail do that as well as giving us a calendar and notes and tasks software.

Suff, I had Lotus SmartSuite as my main office suite for many years - Ami/WordPro, Approach, 1,2,3 and Organizer. It came free with a magazine subscription and I loved the whole thing. Such a shame it was dropped.

Workingman wrote:Suff, I had Lotus SmartSuite as my main office suite for many years - Ami/WordPro, Approach, 1,2,3 and Organizer. It came free with a magazine subscription and I loved the whole thing. Such a shame it was dropped.

My thoughts on IBM and the games the Websphere Service group played internally; that led directly to the destruction of Lotus Notes and SmartSuite, are not printable in polite company. Never mind the fact that they put me out of a job I was actually very good at (plus I very much enjoyed doing) and forced me into Project management. A job I am quite good at but dislike to a degree.

I downloaded a copy of Symphony for the simple fact that somewhere, in my copious list of files, there are some Lotus WordPro wordprocessing files and the only software left on the planet (outside of smartsuite), which will open and read it, is Symphony....

Guess what I found

It seems I had that version. In some places it was called the millennium version.

If you want Ami Pro, you would need to download the R3. The torrent seems to have all the files but I didn't check how many seeders there were.

I didn't look at seeders, just downloaded and scanned it with a couple of scanners. It came up clean so I did an install, it even has Freelance and Notes. It is so obviously dated that it is more of a curio than a usable programme, but it brings back happy memories.

I just resurrected an old windows3.1 machine which I had a backup of when I worked for a UK bank 20 years ago.

Pulling up that old Win31 and then upgrading it through win95, millennium (98 cd image was borked), then through to XP was "interesting". Without a virtual machine it would have been impossible, those operating systems don't support any computer made today. Looking at the old operating systems, the old apps (MS Mail 3.2 has an icon of a wasterpaper basket.......), led me back through a path of evolution of the operating systems. Notes 3, my old CompuServe email address book and mailbox from when I used CompuServe to access the web. Old versions of office, programs I used to use...

It was quite a journey of nostalgia. Especially when I realised that MSMail 3.2 doesn't scroll with a mouse wheel. They didn't exist then. Especially when I realised that I needed Chameleon to access the web because Win31 did not have TCP/IP. I had forgotten that even though I wrote an article to PCW magazine about that specifically and the differences with win95, which they published.