Posted by dvanarsd on November 27, 2007
Google Pack is a group of software helps with some very useful items. Pick your own pack and download just the items you want. All freeware, no malware included.
- Google Earth
- Google Desktop
- Norton Security Scan
- Firefox with Google Toolbar
- Google Toolbar for IE
- Adobe Acrobat Reader
- Skype
- StarOffice (a complete office suite of software)
- Spyware Doctor
- Picasa
- Google Photos screensaver
- Google Talk
- RealPlayer
Posted in Everything, Firefox, Freeware/Shareware, Google, Macros & Shortcuts, Malware, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Online Software, Security, Utilities, browsers, spreadsheet, wordprocessing | Tagged: adobe, Desktop, Earth, Firefox, freeware, Google, IE, Norton, photos, Picasa, RealPlayer, screensaver, Skype, Spyware Doctor, StarOffice, Talk, toolbar | 1 Comment »
Posted by dvanarsd on November 26, 2007
Google Apps Google now has online applications: word-processor, spreadsheet, a basic web page maker, email and calendar, which you can access via your web browser with documents and email stored on a ‘drive’ provided by Google. You will need to register with Google. About 2MB of storage for free, more if you switch to the paid service.
Remember: Google insists on storing your documents themselves, and they have been known to lose data on rare occasions. Also, anything confidential is not a good candidate for storing on someone else’s server (unless encrypted, which this is not). It is vulnerable to a number of people demanding access to your files, with or without your knowledge, and perhaps without the same protection for your data that you prefer.
Posted in Email, Everything, Freeware/Shareware, Google, Online Software, spreadsheet, wordprocessing | Tagged: applications, apps, calendar, Email, freeware, Google, Office, online, spreadsheet, word processing | No Comments »
Posted by dvanarsd on November 6, 2007
[last updated May 11, 2008]
Microsoft sells its software, so the University is not able to provide free copies of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) to anyone. The University has to pay for licenses to use that software on campus computers.Student discounts are available from Microsoft and through many distributors.
However, a FREE substitute is OpenOffice, which can save documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats. This would allow you to work in OpenOffice at home, for example, and save in a Microsoft Office format to bring to use on campus.
The software is free, but requires very large downloads (93MB for version 2.0.3, for example). You can also get a version from the Library Software CD-ROM which can be checked out overnight from the Library. For an enhanced version of this with more extras, try OxygenOffice Professional.
OxygenOffice has all the simple extras including everything from a rich clip art gallery to variety of standard document templates (CV, greeting cards, etc.), plus over 90 text fonts, OOOWikipedia (an integrated Wikipedia Search Tools), ability to run Visual Basic for Applications from Calc (the OpenOffice alternative to “Excel”), ability to import Office Open XML (Microsoft Office 2007), and option to export (save as) documents to PDF, LaTex and MediWiki. To top it all off, OOOP has been able to integrate importing of Works and WordPerfect documents.
Note: there’s a lot of file names listed at the site, but the one to select for English is usually the shortest: OOo_2.3.1_071211_Win32Intel_install.exe (for example) the ones with “install_” and more letters (such as “install_de.exe” are non-English language versions. This is for 32-bit Windows. If installing on a Linux system, the shortest file name is usually the English version, again.
Note: 64 bit Linux version are avaliable from these sites:
There are also versions of OpenOffice which can be run from a USB Flash drive. Click here for links.
Posted in Everything, Freeware/Shareware, OpenOffice, OxygenOffice, presentation, spreadsheet, wordprocessing | Tagged: freeware, Office, OpenOffice, OxygenOffice | No Comments »
