Free Software Linux

Access to Knowledge is an important movement designed to make knowledge, well, more accessible. Its conferences a serious knees-up where the great and good in this field congregate. This year, they've done something sensible: Open Document Formats have finally become the default document format for presentations. Having been at all three editions, I am personally impressed that the ISP has come this far. In the first edition, we had proprietary document formats; during the second edition, there was a 50-50 thing going on but the default still remained proprietary. The third edition has proved to be 100% ODF.This needs to become the default at all open conferences: it will help peopl kick the Word/Powerpoint habit.

I'm not a Kindle user. In part, because it's not available in the UK, but also because it seems too closed in terms of its overall architecture. But it's clearly winning fans - and I think that's going to be a problem. Why that might be is revealed by this interesting posting: Reading .DOC and (some) .PDF files. This part of the Kindle's function turns out to be much more important than I anticipated. Mine can't be the only line of work that involves an endless stream of material to read, often arriving as Word .DOC or Adobe .PDF files. I resist printing them out, and I resent the additional hours of sitting in front a computer screen to read them.

No matter how easy Linux distributions make it for newcomers to install and use a free, open-source operating system, nearly everyone has at least one program that only works in Windows. Wine, a free...

IBM has officially launched the commercial version of its Lotus Symphony suite of productivity applications, and looks set amount a challenge to Microsoft Office in its enterprise heartland.

Taking a tip from Adam's recent look at Controlling your Vista PC with Speech Recognition Macros, the Productivity Portfolio blog takes an in-depth look at the speech recognition features built into...

Windows only: Freeware application Some PDF to Word Converter takes your PDFs and—as the name implies—converts them to Microsoft Word documents. It's always been a cinch to print Word...

The Workers' Edge blog points out that a macro written by Dave Rado back in the days of Word 97 to back up and restore time-saving, typo-fixing AutoCorrect settings in Microsoft Word still does the...

Anyone who's tried saving a Word document as a web page knows you get way more than you bargained for in the HTML and CSS department in the result. The Productivity Portfolio blog offers two...

Windows only: Easy Microsoft Word Properties is a helpful tool for anyone who uses Word documents' details listings—Author, Subject, Title, and the like—to keep their work organized or...

Dennis O'Reilly digs into the full-screen mode in Microsoft Office apps and shows how you can still keep your most-used options and tools close at hand, despite the lack of menus and toolbars. The...

A team at Microsoft is looking at the iPhone Software Developer's Kit with an eye toward Mac Office functionality, according to Fortune. Sounds like Word docs might soon be viewable without web-based...

If you ever find yourself needing to review the contents of a Microsoft Word 2007 document (DOCX) but you're sitting at a computer without a Word installation or any other comparable word processor,...

The Digital Inspiration blog offers up five email addresses that offer free file conversion for Word docs, PDFs, and even MP3s with no fuss, no muss—just attach a file, send it, and wait for...

Windows warrior Dennis O'Reilly takes a look at making Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org's Writer app play nice together‐as nice as possible, anyway. For those dual-booting, rocking OO.org...