OpenOffice – PDRater – Permanent Disability Calculators

How to Save Your Law Practice Money: Part I

How to stretch your law offices budget — How to stretch your law office's budget

Cost: $0.00

Savings: $150/computer

Here’s an easy way to save your law practice several hundred dollars in the next few months. The next time you have to purchase a new computer do not buy a copy of MicroSoft Office, MicroSoft Word, or WordPerfect. Even basic versions of these programs can run several hundred dollars per computer. ((Photo courtesy of Krug6)) You don’t have to purchase these programs!

Try OpenOffice instead! I have been using OpenOffice on my home and work computers for the last three years and have been extremely happy with it. I have given copies of this program to family, friends, and colleagues who are also all very happy with it. I’ve used it for simple correspondence, legal pleadings, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Here are a few “real world” benefits:

OpenOffice is totally 100% free open source software

Free as in free. Give it to your friends. Install it at home and on your kids’ computers. Don’t worry about software piracy. Its totally, completely, free.

OpenOffice has better document recovery

Its important to know that OpenOffice is much more stable than anything MicroSoft or WordPerfect has to offer. It is extremely rare that OpenOffice crashes on me. If you’re using MicroSoft Word and you haven’t saved your document at least once, a single crash will completely erase all of your progress. The very few times that OpenOffice has crashed on me I have gotten all of my data back – even when I haven’t saved the file once.

OpenOffice has everything you need

OpenOffice has all the features of MicroSoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and WordPerfect. You can also use the OpenOffice suite of software to open, edit, and save to MicroSoft Word and WordPerfect formats. It won’t automatically open the MicroSoft Office 2007 formats yet, but you can find plugins and software to do this for you (also for free). OpenOffice has spell check, grammar check, autocorrect, macros, and templates (even legal pleading templates!).

OpenOffice can do more than its competitors

OpenOffice can save as, open, and even edit a PDF. Editing a PDF requires a plugin, but it is very easy to install (and also free!). Just being able to print to a PDF is going to make your documents easier to share with others and, hopefully, one day easier to share with EAMS too. ((Not that EAMS will share with you.)) (( Don’t take it personally – EAMS pretty much hates everyone.))

If you’re not convinced to make the leap with your next computer purchase, then download OpenOffice now and give it a shot on your current computer. Here’s their website link:

Download OpenOffice.org – free word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software

Drooling over the Dell Mini 9

By Jay Shergill Posted on March 24, 2009 Posted in Laptop, Not Workers Compensation, Open Source, OpenOffice, Technobabble No Comments Tagged with Computer Dell, E Mail, Filezilla, netbook, Netbooks, Next Computer, Notepad, OpenOffice, Operating System, Pidgin, Price Tag, Programming Text, Remote Access, Sd Card Slot, Spreadsheets, Thunderbird, Word Processing

Since I reviewed available netbooks about two months back several new options have opened up. ((Photo courtesy of Ciccio Pizzettaro)) There’s the new Samsung NC110 ((The Samsung NC110 is the successor to the NC10)) ((A review of the NC110 I found helpful)) and a slew of new Acer One’s.

However, none of them can touch the 4GB Dell Mini 9 on sale right now for $199 with Ubuntu.

I know I had earlier said that 8GB was too small for my purposes. I had even suggested that I was more interested in some of the other available netbooks over the Dell for this reason. However, I want to make my next computer a Dell, true to my word.

The reason I’m considering the 4GB version where I was dismissing the 8GB version before is the incredible price and the purposes to which such a laptop would be put. In order to do about 98% of what I need with a laptop, I could easily use a netbook. On any given day I use:

Firefox for web browsing
Thunderbird for e-mail
Pidgin for instant messaging
FileZilla for FTP transfers
Notepad++ for programming/text editing
OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheets
TightVNC for remote access

All of these programs are open source software and available for Ubuntu ((An easy-to-use Liniux installation.)) and Windows. So, in shopping for a laptop, I really don’t care about which operating system I use. The 4GB Dell Mini 9 with Ubuntu could do all of these things – and for a $199 price tag. Plus, with the Mini’s SD card slot, I could pop in an extra 16GB of memory for only $26.

OpenOffice v3.0: Helping with EAMS

By Jay Shergill Posted on November 13, 2008 Posted in EAMS, Free, Laptop, Open Source, OpenOffice, PDRater, Technobabble, Workers Compensation Resources No Comments Tagged with Cover Sheets, Dell, Editing Pdf, Microsoft Office, Ms Office 2000, new year, OpenOffice, Openoffice Org, Overwhelming Demand, Pdf File, Pleadings, Preferred Word, Spreadsheet, Word Processing, Wordperfect Formats

MicroSoft has no one to blame but themselves for my deleting MicroSoft Office. Well, its partly Dell’s fault too, but that’s a long story I’ll tell some other time. (Short version: Dell repaired a prior laptop and shipped it to a construction site in Oakland.)

Once I tried OpenOffice, I never looked back. Its my preferred word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, office suite program. Not only is it better than MicroSoft office in just about every way, but its also completely free. You might be interested in trying it out because I believe it will help you tremendously with EAMS.

OpenOffice.org released version 3.0 of their program on October 13, 2008. It was so wildly popular that their website was crushed under the overwhelming demand. The three most important things to know about OpenOffice are:

Its open source, so its completely free. So, there’s no reason not to give it a shot.
It can open, edit, and save to any MS Office 2000, 2003, 2007, and WordPerfect formats.
It can print or export any file to a PDF.

If you’re a Workers’ Compensation professional in California, you’re probably dealing with EAMS. Since filing things with EAMS means working with a lot of PDF’s. In order to keep from reinventing the wheel, it makes sense to save those PDF’s of the document cover sheets. But what if you need to make a small change later on? Well, OpenOffice v3.0 can help with that too.

Using an extension ((basically a small program)) OpenOffice can open and edit and re-save a PDF file. Not even Adobe, the company that promotes the PDF format ((I know that’s redundant.)) , does a good job of opening and editing PDF’s.

This is a really big deal to me because editing saved PDF’s is going to save me a lot of time editing settlement documents and various pleadings.

Update

I wrote the above about a month ago while I gave OpenOffice 3.0 a shot. It won’t install on my Vista laptop but works great on my XP desktop. I’ve reverted to OpenOffice 2.4 on the laptop while I wait for a fix. OpenOffice 2.4 is still free, but it won’t open MS Office 2007 formats (which not everyone is using anyhow) and cannot edit PDFs.

2003 reasons to delete Vista

By Jay Shergill Posted on August 28, 2008 Posted in Not Workers Compensation, Open Source, PDRater, Technobabble, Vista No Comments Tagged with Constant Struggle, Drive Space, Exact Problem, Faster Computer, Lather Rinse Repeat, Microsoft Office, Ms Office 2003, Ms Office 2007, New Computer, New Software, New Version Of Windows, Newest Version Of Windows, Office Productivity Software, Old Computer, OpenOffice, Playstation 3, Popular Office, Processor Speed, User Access Control, Vicious Cycle, Windows Microsoft

Looong story short, after Dell lost my Windows XP laptop they replaced eventually it with a new laptop (hooray!) with Windows Vista (boo!). Sure, I got used to it – but its a constant struggle. Once you strip down Vista, yanking out all the features that make it different from Windows XP, its not that bad. But, then again, there isn’t much good about it either. More than 18 months after the release of Vista, here’s my reason to not use it:

User Access Control
It requires more resources (hard drive space, RAM, processor speed) ((Compare Windows XP’s requirements to Windows Vista’s for yourself.))
It will not work with MS Office 2003

In this day and age, there is exactly one reason to have Windows – Microsoft Office. If you want to play games, you’re better off with an XBox or PlayStation 3. If you want to surf the web, you can use your phone. For anything else, you can use a Mac or Linux.

A friend of mine confided that when her copy of MS Office 2003 didn’t work with Vista she bought MS Office 2007. This exact problem, my copy of MS Office 2003 not being able to run on my laptop running Vista, is why I turned to OpenOffice. Here’s the vicious cycle I perceive:

Your old computer is slow.
Buy a new computer.
New computer comes with newest version of Windows.
You buy all new software to run on the new version of Windows.
Your computer is now loaded down with so much junk you need a faster computer.

I absolutely refuse to believe Microsoft is incapable of figuring out a way for their newest operating system to work with the world’s most popular office productivity software. The only possible explanation I will accept is that Microsoft is using the manufacturer’s theory of LRR. ((Lather, rinse, repeat.))

Tag: OpenOffice