Replies

Thanks for a great article. The introduction of the ribbon was when I stopped using Microsoft Office entirely, but I still have to support family members. I can’t begin to estimate the time I’ve wasted trying to figure out where something is in the %$#@! ribbon! Maybe we can just create a tab called “Useful Stuff” and put everything there.

I agree Firefox is shooting itself in the foot, but not because of the search engine issue. As was pointed out, others would be happy to jump into the void (personally, I changed my default to Dogpile, anyway). In my mind, Firefox will kill itself with the change to its interface and its upgrade policy. The folks at Mozilla have as much as said “we don’t give a &*$% about corporate users,” but that’s where a lot of their market is, like it or not.

After reading the article, I’m inclined to agree that this is a tempest in a teapot. At the same time, I fully understand why people are up in arms. Every year, companies more and more show their utter disrespect for their clients and their privacy, all in the name of making a buck. As far as I’m concerned, no marketer has a *right* to know anything about me that I don’t explicitly choose to reveal. I opt out of every data-sharing plan I can, and I resent companies that reserve the “right” to share data with their marketing partners when I don’t even know who those partners are. It’s gotten to the point that consumers are justifiably paranoid about their information being revealed and shared.

Thanks for the help, guys. Thanks especially for the comments about mikogo.com; they’re the one I was specifically referring to when I said they don’t really give you much information until you register, but what little they have available before that does sound good.

I completely forgot about WebEx, for some reason! I think maybe in the back of my mind I associate significant fees with them.

Just for the record, my concern about users paying for their calls is that while most cell phone plans will include long distance, I think most of the people on this call will not have hands-free devices for their phones. If that’s the case, a full-size phone is a lot more comfortable on a 2-hour call than a cell phone is (and the speaker-phone feature of every cell phone I’ve used, so far, is of very poor quality).

I’ll report back after the meeting — as yet unscheduled — to let you know what we ended up doing and how it worked out.

Dave

I’ve used OpenOffice.org (to use the fully correct name) for several months now, and I am mostly happy with it, myself. Only three quibbles:

1. I haven’t figured out how to set the default tabs to something useful (such as .5″ instead of .47″). Changing them for each document gets old fast!

2. The entire suite loads at the same time, so it’s a big memory hog. This is a definite problem on an older laptop with only 512MB RAM.

3. Presenter is somewhat less than intuitive when inserting a picture into a slide. It gives every indication that the rest of your presentation has been deleted, when in fact it’s still there but you need to figure out the secret key sequence to get back to it.

Definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for an alternative, but I won’t go so far as to say it’s the be-all and end-all.

Thanks for all the suggestions. Haven’t been able to try any, yet, because the machine has developed other problems (apparently RAM-related) since my original post and I’m constantly afraid the next time it boots will be its last. I’m currently borrowing another computer to check out new ones — when I can least afford it, naturally. I’ll report back if anything comes of the keyboard issue.