This and that....

This is the opening window of the current version of Open Office, the free and complete office program from Sun and the open source community. I really don't need a full office program these days, being retired, but I've got lots of room on the hard-drive for more stuff, and it is a very handy program to have. Among other things, it uses Java which makes it a very versatile program, and for another, it's compatible with various programs usually found in Microsoft's Office, and can open and work with those files, and convert them into the Open Document Format, which makes them more universally useful.

For example, it can open and play a slide show made by Microsoft Office PowerPoint if for some reason your Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer 2007 doesn't display it properly for you. Like last night - a friend sent me a very nice slide show of pictures of the moon along with the Moonlight Sonata as background music, and there were over sixty images in it. I couldn't get it to play in its native Microsoft format. I could see the first image and listen to the music, or else I could manually scroll through the images, but I couldn't get it to run automatically with both the images and the music no matter what I tried, and speaking of that, cussing didn't help. So I downloaded the latest version of OpenOffice, and watched the slide show. My friend was right - it's a lovely presentation.