On Thu, 21 Jul 2005 13:00:58 EDT Wirt Atmar <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> PowerPoint is the most common way to create slides, but I
> suspect that PowerPoint ownership is relatively rare in this
> group, and it's an expensive program.
I suggest that those without (Licenced) access to PowerPoint, or to
MicroSoft Office, and who would like to use a powerful Office Suite
take a look at Open Office (OOo) at www.openoffice.org. The
current released version is 1.1.4 (soon to be 1.1.5) and the 1.9
beta fork for version 2 is also well along and fairly stable (I use
1.9b at work and on my laptop myself).
With the exception of FrontPage, OOo possesses everything that MS-
Office does. It comprises Write (Word), Calc (Excel),Impress
(PowerPoint), Draw (Vector Drawing Tool - No MS-Off stand-alone
equivalent), Base (Access OOoV1.9 only), and Math (MS Equation
Editor). It desires a Java Run-time Engine be installed although I
believe that it can run without one (I have not tried it) and it is
currently available for Unix, Linux, Mac OS X (X11,) and MS Windows
95+ operating systems.
OOo v1.9 (and probably 1.1.4) provides for built-in PDF authoring
from OOo source documents. It also supports MS-Off file formats
and can be configured to use these as defaults (at least in 1.9b).
It has macro scripting support and templates although there are few
samples provided.
We began deploying OOo to our users last year and now have a 30/70%
mix of OOo to MS-Off installation with a couple of dual use
machines. Other than a few administrative problems convincing
people to think carefully about the format in which they should
save their documents this gradual replacement strategy has worked
well. It is our intention to entirely replace MS-Off with OOo as
desktop systems are upgraded.
The price is $0.00.
Regards,
Jim
P.S.
We have just begun the long process of moving our HP3000(MPE/iX)-
Image-Powerhouse applications to I86(Linux)-PostgreSQL-Ruby(Rails).
I find it poignant that I was introduced to Ruby by a message
posted to this list a long time ago. In the several years since
Ruby has evolved in a remarkable and yet quite constrained fashion.
Recently a new development tool for developing web applications in
Ruby has been released to public beta.
I recommend that anyone considering a full fledged application
design project involving the httpd delivery model take a look at
Rails. Still in beta it is nonetheless one of the slickest pieces
of development software that I have ever experienced.
(http://www.ruby-lang.org/ and http://www.rubyonrails.org/)
JBB8
P.P.S.
We are also investigating dumping our MS-W2K servers (and MS-AD)
for a SAMBA 3 network authentication scheme using LDAP. Hi-Ho! Hi-
Ho! It's out the door Bill goes!
JBB8
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