Office

Flash Animation -- love it or hate it, chances are that you have to work with it at some point if you design or otherwise work with web sites. Programs to work with Flash beyond the "create a button' or "create a Flash ad banner" level are usually complex, require a lot of programming ability, and high priced. Thanks to Vertorian making their Vectorian Giotto program freeware in mid-April, this is no longer true.

Early versions of Microsoft Office used a multi-document interface. That is, if you had multiple documents open in Word, Excel, or Powerpoint you could switch between them using a tab bar within the Microsoft Office Application. Microsoft research apparently found that this confused new users who looked to their taskbar to switch between documents, so starting with Office 2003 Microsoft changed things so each document opened in a separate instance of the application and you switched between documents using the taskbar.

While extra spaces usually aren't a problem when you are entering data by hand in Microsoft Excel, they often worm their way into data that import from other formats. Once in your spreadsheet they can be hard to find and they will often foul up your spreadsheet to the point it doesn't print -- or even work -- correctly. Manually finding these extra spaces at the beginning and/or end of items is a time-consuming and error-prone process.

PDF files have become a standard way to send formatted documents that you do not want the recipient to be able to change. Unfortunately, the Adobe Acrobat, the commercial software designed to create PDF files is priced for businesses and individuals who have money to burn. Acrobat also has many features that post people will never use. Fortunately, there are many programs, including a good select of free programs, that will create PDF files without Acrobat. PDFCreator is one of the best of the free PDF creation programs.

Abiword is a powerful free cross-platform word processor program with the features most people need with the bloat and complexity of all the features few people ever use. The focus of the latest 2.8x version of Abiword is on improved collaboration features.

Here are some of the new features:

Improved Collaboration support

Is most of your work done on your computer? Would it be helpful to know how much time you spend using the various software installed on your computer? With an easy way to tag usage to a particular project or client? If so, the freeware ManicTime may be just what you need.

Features (From the web site)

ManicTime automatically collects data on your computer usage. It records active and away time, as well as which applications you used and for how long you used them.

Go-oo is a fork of the free Open Office office suite with improved compatibility with Microsoft Office formats and a number of other improvements and tweaks, including speeding up the startup time. That along makes this branch worth looking at for anyone already using Open Office.

* OpenXML / DOCX support: Go-oo provides a built-in .docx (MS Office 2007) import filter.
* OpenXML / XLSX support: Go-oo provides a built-in .xlsx (MS Office 2007) import filter.
* OpenXML / PPTX support: Go-oo provides a built-in .pptx (MS Office 2007) import filter.

AutoHotKey is one of the few windows programs I have really missed using Linux. While it had a lot of power, I used it mainly for its "hot string" abilities. I'd type =btw and AutoHotKey would replace "=btw" with "by the way." Linux didn't seem to have anything that could easily replace that feature of AutoHotKey. That was annoying, but I learned to live without it.

Microsoft did it again with Word 2007. They changed the file format so that older versions and other Word Processors can't read it. If you get a Word 2007 .docx file from an associate or client, you no longer need to buy Office 2007 to read it. Docx2rtf is a freeware program that converts .docx files to the much more standard richtext (.rtf) format -- preserving as much of the original formating as the .rtf format allows. It will also convert the new "ODF" format used by the latest versions Openoffice, NeoOffice and similar program to standard richtext format.

PlayOnLinux is a frontend that helps to install a number of population Windows games and applications on Linux using WINE. It connects to an online PlayOnLinux script repository for the latest script to automate the installation of a given program. You still have to own a copy of the Windows program you want to install, of course.