How to Become Dangerous (and more productive) - Comments Page 1

Nope. The answer to the opening question is "Solitaire" - the indispensable mental-health exercise that helps you cope with the ever-changing frustrations and shortcomings of Word and Excel and the rest.

Actually, Microsoft Office was / is NOT the best package of its kind - it is the one that won the marketing war because it used to come with Windows. There were better pieces of software (AmiPro, anyone?) but they eventually lost the war for market share.

Word Perfect anyone? How about Word Star? I first used Word Star on a Kaypro II computer in the mid 80's before going on to use Word Perfect on a PC.

I HATE the way that Excel will take some text strings or hexadecimal numbers that are being imported into the spreadsheet, and automatically convert them into either dates or exponential numbers (depending on the specific value). So my spreadsheet will end up with nonsensical data in random cells. There are several complicated work-arounds to try to solve this problem, but they aren't always 100% effective, and there's no easy way to be sure that some of my data isn't still corrupted.

It would have been so easy for Microsoft to provide an option which would globally turn off this automatic conversion function. Users have bitched about this problem for decades, and Microsoft just keeps ignoring it. I've occasionally had to resort to using LibreOffice Calc, but even then the problem sometimes reappears when I export the spreadsheet back into the Excel format.

I did a quick search through the ExcelTips website just now, to see if it might provide a simple solution, but didn't find anything useful. All it had were a few more complicated work-arounds. Aaahhhrrrggg!!

As one of your long term Tourbus readers just wanted to pass on that the good programs from early DOS still provide useful functioning. Things like 1-2-3 which ended up as a part of Lotus, which I still use.

I do a lot of writing. I've been using MS Word for years... I've tried the others but I have always came back to MS Word; it's just better (my opinion)

Surely the first thing to install on a new (Windows) PC would be a good security suite, before you venture anywhere to get anything else?

The next things I install are likely

Unless you are constrained by your employer's IT policies, or use macros programmed in VisualBasic, why spend your money on Microsoft when you can have LibreOffice for free ?
It can do almost everything MS Office does, and has no problem reading and writing your documents in Microsoft's proprietary formats.

Hooray for the shout-out for Allen Wyatt! His pages are, along with yours, some of the web-resources I most value. I am delighted to learn that you and he are acquainted — you have both earned your well-deserved reputations by providing free, solid advice over many years — long may you both continue!

There are other good resources that I trust, but yours and Allen's have in common a sense that your foundations stretch back to an earlier (better?) era of the Internet before the scammers took hold, and there is, for both your sites, a sense that this is the personal project of somebody whose primary motive in setting it up was not personal profit but a generosity of spirit.

I hope and trust that you have both profited from your enterprises. I have always regarded you and Allen in the same good light and am delighted to see you recommend him. I wholeheartedly recommend both your sites to anybody.

Did I miss it or was Outlook even mentioned? That is my primary means for using a PC. Of course, search engines are widely used along with favorite web sites for current news items. I don't work in an office now, so seldom use Word from Office 360.

Dear Bob,
Thanks so much for the info. I had no idea that Allen Wyatt's help sites existed. I have used Microsoft Word for years with great results.

At home I always use OpenOffice. A holdover from the days when open source was all the rage. Any chance there is anyone out there doing the same thing as Allen Wyatt for OpenOffice? There's a wiki for OpenOffice but apparently it only goes up to OpenOffice 3. I'm using 4.1.5.

I was a PC user at work & an Apple user at home. We used Corel Word Perfect & Quatro Pro before Microsoft arrived. Loved Corel! Apple isn't as good. I also miss Palm. I sometimes wonder where those engineers went.

LibreOffice and Notepad++ (like someone else mentioned). Office products are bloated and generate larger files than necessary. Why not go with a free solution?

I must be the odd one out. I have never used nor had the need to use or even let the thought pass through my head to use Excel. In my home I have never had the desire or need to compose a spreadsheet. To be honest I am still a bit hazy on exactly what a spreadsheet actually is.
I worked in an office environment for a 5 year period and while the cooperation had MS-Office installed, the only part of if the employees accessed was Outlook for email.
Any letters or notes or books I have needed to write have always come out clearly on Open Office or Libreoffice or even Microsoft Write.
I propose that the first program used on any new computer is MS Explorer to download a better browser.

It's been imitated by many, but never quite duplicated. It did just that to WordPerfect.

Anybody other than Dan remember AmiPro? IMO, that was head and shoulders above MS-Word. While working in Word Support at Microsoft, I gave a presentation on it and everybody agreed that it was much more intuitive and feature packed than Word. However, thanks to the sales force of MS, it didn't really matter who had the best software program. Companies who had employees who loved whatever they were using -- mainly WordPerfect -- bought into the Office promise of superiority and created all kinds of problems. For a couple of years, the MS Support people had to know about as much about WordPerfect so we could assist those who were forced to switch to Word. One of the least favorite things after answering the phone was, "It was so easy in WordPerfect, but now..."

I haven't worked at MS since 2003 (or anywhere else, for that matter). I stopped updating Word due to the expense and the lack of need to do any heavy word processing. When I needed to read a Word .doc (or .docx) file, I used a compatible program. Currently I use TextMaker from SoftMaker Free Office. It does way more than I need and doesn't cost anything.

For the most part, I try not to use Mostly Sh!tty products. I am guilty of using Hotmail.( I must have felt that MS was the lesser of two evils when I did that. I might switch to Gmail soon. I am signed up.) I have been using Open Office for years. It has done very well. Other than the fact that , after the last upgrade, it doesn't autocorrect spelling. I think that I have read that I can reload it and that problem will be corrected.

Yes: first solitaire, then security, then Firefox.
As for office suites, I used MS Office when it came FREE on a desktop I once used. After that I used OpenOffice for a few years. For the last several years (a lot of them) I've used LibreOffice. No complaints, except maybe it has a lot of "stuff" I've never used (or probably understood).

LibreOffice, yes!

Another vote for Libre Office. MS office is popular as it appears to be the only choice when shopping for a pre-installed office suite.

go to www (dot) libreoffice (dot) org and download it.