This installment of Technically Speaking comes with a warning: great software does not have to be expensive; in fact sometimes it is free.

I am sure that a good percentage of my readers use Microsoft Office for home and school use. It can be rather expensive, especially if you want the professional version that includes everything. There is an alternative, OpenOffice, and it is free!

Even if you already own Microsoft Office it is worth a look. It is ideal for a second installation on a note book or even as a compliment to Microsoft Office on your primary machine. It is a very nice and compact suit that also has very modest hardware requirements; it is perfect for an older slow system or a not bleeding edge notebook.

The suit contains:

· Writer, a word processor like Microsoft Word and very flexible, can also be used to make web pages.
· Calc, a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel, with some great options.
· Draw, a nice drawing program, very powerful.
· Impress, a great presentation program like Microsoft PowerPoint, with some unique options.

The programs work well together and can open most files created in Microsoft Office. OpenOffice can also save files in Microsoft Office formats making transferring files between the two easy and convenient.

A couple of very nice options that OpenOffice has that Microsoft Office lacks are the ability to save documents as a .PDF (viewable in Adobe Acrobat) and also as a Flash (.swf) file. These are great options and very useful. The ability to save presentations as a Flash file is very interesting, it allows for a self running slide show that will run independent of Impress and making presentations for inclusion in web pages a breeze.

In fact I write all the Technically Speaking columns on OpenOffice. Find out more about this great free program at OpenOffice.org ( http://www.OpenOffice.org ) there are links to download for the Windows, MAC, and Linux versions. A direct link to the download for Windows follows: http://download.openoffice.org/1.1.4/index.html

Life is not all about business, there is the artistic side of the brain needs some stimulation and ArtRage fills that role nicely.

ArtRage is a painting program, but that doesn’t do it justice the description from the site does a better job than I can:

“ArtRage is a painting package designed to provide a realistic and fun simulation of using paint on a canvas, along with pens, pencils, crayons, and other tools. You can run ArtRage on a normal Windows machine with a mouse, but it works particularly well if you have a graphics tablet.
ArtRage is all about playing with paint without the mess, and having fun in the process. You can paint your own image from a blank canvas to completed work, or load in a picture to trace and have the tools pick their colours for you as you paint over it.”

It is a great program that once you get the hang of it will steal a lot of your free time. It is a quick and easy windows download from http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html

If you are not convinced to try it, go to the site and look at the Gallery, it is amazing what people have made. This is a must have for art students, and it can help bring out the inner artist in anyone.

This edition’s cool link: The Wayback Machine, type any website address into the Wayback Machine and take a peek at how it used to look. Type in www.muw.edu (don’t forget the www this time) and look at the MUW site all the way back to 1996. http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Technically Speaking 02/17/2005

This edition it is my turn to ask you, the readers, a question. Do you own an MP3 player? What kind/brand is it? And how long have you had it? End you answers to me at mat@muw.edu by and I will publish the results of this informal survey in a future edition.

As always you can send your tech-related questions to me at mat@muw.edu, and I will post an answer in a future edition.

For clickable links to the programs mentioned, check out The Spectator online at muw.edu/spectator.
Mark Taylor, a senior in communication, was previously an information systems trainer for the US Air Force and a technical support technician for an internet service provider. A game and consumer electronics reporter during the Dot Com boom, he now owns Fanfare Media Services in Columbus.