3 posts tagged “office 2007”

I've been looking around for the cheapest place to buy Cysgliad, which is a Welsh dictionary/thesaurus/spellchecker for Word and OpenOffice.org. But it's the same price everywhere, £50ish. Wow, that's expensive for what it is. And it's far more expensive for home or business users that it is for government-ish users, which is arse-backwards if you ask me. If you work for the council, Cysgliad will be on your machine. College, voluntary organisations etc can all get it in bulk, and encourage all their employees to use it. Which is fine, and the software is widely used.

BUT... what about the kids at home? The small business? The blogger?

IMO, and no-one will pay attention but I'll say it anyway, Cysgliad should be a kind of shareware model: free for home/non-commercial use, a minimal fee for commercial use. Come on Bangor Uni, let's get this software into every house in Wales. I know you have to make your money back, but considering it was partly funded by the Welsh Language Board, lets not be greedy here. Afterall, they claim "The Board's main aim is to make it easier for everyone to use Welsh in all walks of life." As long as you can afford it, it seems. A paper dictionary and a paper thesaurus will cost me what.. £6 each? Sell Cysgliad for £20 and THEN you'll see a profit, simply because of the increase in sales volume.

Of course, the users could rebel, and say you don't actually NEED Cysgliad. Spot the odd one out:

The Welsh spell checker for Office 2007 is a free download from Microsoft. They also have Office 2003, XP and Vista packs for download. For FREE.

The latest version of OpenOffice.org, Welsh Version, is also free.

Cysgliad, the Welsh spell checker, dictionary and thesaurus developed by a University and funded by government is.... £50. Doh! But wait... the OSX version of Cysgliad, from the same people, is.. FREE! What the hell...?

Of course, if the Cysgliad people would like to send me a copy, I'll stop ranting about the cost lol

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update: hmmm... the OSX version is just a bunch of Python scripts. I wonder....... ;)

I've been accused of being a closet Windows fan. Well, my last few posts were anything but closeted. I like Vista. Better than I ever liked XP. Granted, most of that is down to Aero, but its the small things that make the big difference. For example, if you spend your life in front of Windows, using Word and Outlook as your primary tools, then switching to Vista and Office 2007 will make your whole experience... nicer. Like moving your office from a run-down damp warehouse into a modern air-conditioned building. Its just nicer....

...however, please don't get the wrong impression here. OK, Vista installed fine on my five year old machine, and I like it. But Ubuntu also installed fine, and I like that. Hell, even OSX (cough) installed without a hitch on my computer. Infact, I found that OSX runs faster than XP, Vista and Ubuntu, and has less issues - go figure. The only sticking point with OSX that I found was the lack of a graphics driver, so no OpenGL, Quartz or Core Image. But then, people have experienced the same thing with installing Vista, especially if you're running Nvidia cards. (OK, there was another sticking point, as in updates from Apple have to be... modified... to install properly, but we won't go there)

So while I may blab on about how nice Vista is, I still don't rate it as high as OSX. Infact, if all I needed a computer for was web browsing, sending email, and office stuff, I would have kept OSX. Apple should bite the bullet and just release it for vanilla PCs already, capitalise on the apparent bombing of Vista. "But they'll never do it, and even if they could, there would be no drivers for it!". Hmmm.. how is that any different to Vista then?

If you could walk into PC World tommorow, and buy a box with Windows Vista or a box with OSX, well... no contest. As much as I like Vista, it can't touch OSX. (Not that I ever buy stuff from PC World, I'm more of a Dabs person myself lol)

(BTW, I would post to this journal much more if there was an external client for it, like Semagic or something. How come there isn't? Or is there, and i've just missed it?)

In the library! With a candlestick!
.....or was it Office 2007? Or Colonel Mustard? Annnnyhow...

I installed Office 2007 earlier, because I never had MS Office before, and a demo was too tempting to pass on. Well, it all installed fine. Then I tried to fire up the Fox - it instantly crashed. WTF? So I tried again, and again, and again? Nada

So for the next hour I scooted about Office 2007, Vistas control panel, etc, trying to find out exactly what Office had done to kill Firefox. Was this a conspiracy by the Redmond Illuminati to keep us all using Internet Explorer? The plot thickened, no matter what I did, I couldn't get Firefox to run.

So in desperation, I Fired up Firefox in safe mode. And it worked. Aha, thinks me: a dodgy plugin somewhere. So I went through the plugins, disabling them and enabling them one-by-one. And yup, it was the Skype plugin that was causing Firefox to die.

Now what is bizarre is that it never did this before I installed Office 2007, so Office/Outlook must have changed something in Skype, or the telephony registry or somesuch. Anyhow I uninstalled the Skype plugin and I have my Fox back.

Whhhheeew.

Bored yet? ;)