If you have any type of software that is open source that you would like others to enjoy post info and perhaps a link to the software here.

If you just simply want to discuss information on open source news...again post it here.

Lets show people their are alternatives to microsoft.

Hopefully soon I will have my review of OpenOffice done. Meanwhile here is a link to download it.

http://www.openoffice.org/ info
http://download.openoffice.org/index.html download.

I've been playing with the 2.0 beta's for a while, very nice suite, big improvement over 1.1 series :D

Will be nice to have it finally hit final soon, but once again it got delayed... oh well, still very stable and useable in it's current release candidate.

Another useful cross platform office program is Abiword, it's very small and light, but quite powerful, especially for it's size. Good for older machines and when you want to do simple things and don't need the big pigs.

I got it, installed it and have been playing with it. Not bad. Hope to put it to a real use test soon.

I got a free copy of Office 2003 from Microsoft so I haven't had the need to checkout another office suite. I will have to check. I have recommended it to some people who didn't have office or there computer came with Microsoft Works (Yeah right :)) and needed a real word processing program.

I am also using the 2.0 version, for Windows.

Today I played with the "base" (access) section and the "Impress" (powerpoint) section.

Base I think still needs some work, well for me anyway. Your everyday beginning users would find it more than adequate. Also I'm not used to the differences and still am having some trouble finding how to format a list box instead of text so it can be linked to other tables. Only worked with it for about 1 hour though and with some improvement it will be good.

Impress seems to have most of the tools that powerpoint does. From the small amount of time I spent on it I think i will like the toolbar setup much better and the overall feel of the program. There are not many templates yet, beginning users probably won't like that, as for me I create my own backgrounds and customize all the font and other aspects myself. So the lack of themes and templates does not bother me.

It claims you have the capability to save or convert to a flash file. I haven't found that yet...of course I haven't really looked at it much and I'm assuming that it might just use the xml conversion. Thats a question for you Andrew. Can I make it compatible with flash...swf. If so I will use it for a lot more things because it will allow for me to put presentations online.

yup, just go file - export

Haven't played with impress much though, but it is there and does work (How well I can't tell you yet)

Thank you Andrew ....lol i like to overlook simple things sometimes.

Impress seems to be a nice product. People that are used to Powerpoint might be thrown off by the layout and different ways to get to things but once you get used to it is not that much different. I can also see the lack of themes and color schemes being a problem for beginning users, but I make all my backgrounds as i said before. I found the toolbar structure and to be much more....smooth...(i guess, couldn't think of a word to describe it)

Lack of preset backgrounds and color schemes is a plus, maybe if people learn to create there own we won't have to sit through so many that look exactly the same...

Yeah I know what you mean....
I'm in my last year of college....and we do a lot of presentations and wow do i hate those presets....most the color schemes :flack: well they are not good.

I will try to find a background I made for one of mine. I'm no pro but it works for me.