Greywind is Dead. Long Live Talon!

[Hālian]

All hail Talon, Countess in The Box and Fifth Loroi Emperor-elect

[Arioch]

Didn't arrive today. Should arrive tomorrow.

[Absalom]

Didn't arrive today. Should arrive tomorrow.

Sounds like my paycheck.

[Arioch]

Still hasn't arrived. I guess FedEx is unclear on the definition of "next business day."

[GeoModder]

Lots of State Holidays in early September?

[Arioch]

Yay! It finally arrived. Appears to be working; I'm posting from it right now.

[Suederwind]

Yay! It finally arrived. Appears to be working; I'm posting from it right now.

Congratulations!
I hope it works as good as expected (or better).

[Southern Cross]

Congratulations seconded.....

[Arioch]

Thanks. Things are going reasonably well; I have completed most of the data backup and now I'm reinstalling applications. I'm guessing it will take most of the weekend to get things back to a usable state.

Having paid for Microsoft Office what must be 6 or 7 times, I declined to re-purchase it yet again, so I'm looking into alternatives. Any recommendations?

I'm pretty pleased with Windows 7 thus far. I had been previously using a borrowed Windows 8 laptop for a little while, and I was not pleased with it at all. And it's extremely nice having a non-crippled computer after so long (what? I can do more than one thing at once??).

I used a 500 GB Seagate Backup Plus drive for weekly backups on the old system; it seems to have backed things up well, but I had serious trouble trying to restore the data. The Seagate Dashboard software is obtuse, slow as a pig, and even after I figured out how to use it properly, was incapable of restoring a single drive image from the 29 incremental backup images, so I had to spend the better part of a day piecing it together manually. Very disappointing from what seemed like a nice product. And from what I understand, you can't use Windows 7's native backup with the Backup Plus either, because it uses a non-standard formatting scheme.

It was interesting to see how much data I have.

66 GB - My Art
11 GB - My Documents
12 GB - Website stuff
28 GB - Images
30 GB - Music
13 GB - Misc Downloads
02 GB - Code

[Suederwind]

Having paid for Microsoft Office what must be 6 or 7 times, I declined to re-purchase it yet again, so I'm looking into alternatives. Any recommendations?

The last free Office software I used daily was Libre Office (Link) about 1 1/2 years ago. It was not perfect, but that might have changed as they seem to have put a lot of work in it. However, I got a free version of the newest MS Office in the meantime and haven't tried Libre Office since then. There might be still problems with displaying or saving documents originally created in MS Office (especially Excel or Powerpoint), as well as displaying or editing Documents created with Libre on MS Office.
But whats wrong with your old MS Office versions? Not working on Windows 7 or are they coupled with your old computer in some way?

[Hujedamig]

I've used Open Office for some time now. It does the job well, and can save/open all the known formats I have come across.

[Arioch]

I'm mostly back up and running; Photoshop and Lightwave are installed and appear to be working.

But whats wrong with your old MS Office versions? Not working on Windows 7 or are they coupled with your old computer in some way?

That's always an option. But since the version of Office that came with Greywind is from 2006, I thought I'd check out what's available from this decade. Talon comes with a 30-day trial for Office 365 (the subscription-based version), and so I have something to use in the short term, but I can already tell I don't like it. It uses the ugly Windows 8 visual style, for starters.

[fredgiblet]

OpenOffice is very robust and feature complete unless you use VBA or do extremely in-depth things. LibreOffice is a spin-off of OpenOffice created because some of the people who worked on OpenOffice were concerned about Oracle owning Sun who own OpenOffice. Either one should handle any low to medium complexity office job and most high-complexity jobs just fine. LibreOffice is a little more free (as in speech) but the differences are pretty minor.

[Southern Cross]

I use OpenOffice 4.0.0 myself.

[Mikk]

LibreOffice is a little more free (as in speech) but the differences are pretty minor.

Actually, the difference is most likely huge. (Best to ignore comparisons into the past beyond 2 years, but the differences in the near-term are big). Unlike Apache (and previously Oracle) OpenOffice, LO took a 'radical' course of determined code-clean up, from around the moment of forking, so now they have more developers to maintain a smaller (less than a third of AOO) code base. The future for LibreOffice users looks brighter, altho, OO seems to be boasting smaller full-suite installation sizes for some reason (from my limited first glance anyway, on my system AOO might be 2/3 the size).

I consider myself fortunate that both suites are too much more than I need, so I don't even install partial-suite of LibreOffice these days, Abiword and Gnumeric will do.

But for Arioch? I'd probably suggest LibreOffice, without the java-requiring Base database management thingy. Avoiding RTF as a file format is a recommendation I shall give everyone, just in case.

Edit: didn't like a comma.

[pinheadh78]

For backing up files I long ago gave up on dedicated backup-products. Each product has its own proprietary format that can render data irrecoverable or in your case fails to restore properly.

I've gone back to old-school Robocopy for my own backups for my 100GB of photos, 80 GB movies, and 40 GB other files.

I use an old BATCH file with a robo-copy string that when executed will pull data from the target-path and push it to the destination path. With the right flags you can make it update only "new" files thus speeding it up as it wont re-copy data that hasn't changed. The best part is that because its standard windows file-system and your current file-structure you never have to worry about your backup software becoming obsolete or having problems restoring data.

Robocopy command instructions can be found here... http://ss64.com/nt/robocopy.html

For each directory tree just make a new-line in the batch file then run the whole thing as a scheduled task.

If your interested I can go dig-up one of the strings and post it here.

As for an MS Office alternative I would have to put my vote towards Open-Office as its the most mature and feature rich of the free solutions.

Peace out

[Solemn]

I have used both OpenOffice and LibreOffice on my OpenSUSE desktop.

I switched to LibreOffice some time ago and never looked back.

I cannot in good conscience recommend OpenOffice to anyone. Without using certain patches it was like playing Russian Roulette with five bullets in the revolver. It would take upwards of ten minutes for the program to even start, at which point every other time it started it would corrupt my files, crash the entire system, or turn the screen into a Hall Of Mirrors until I could kill the program through a terminal command. It was excruciating. I had heard that there were external patches produced by the OO user community which could be applied to make OO a usable product, but I found that in practice those patches fell far short of such promises; it became more like playing Russian Roulette with three bullets in the gun rather than five, but was still far from the panacea I had been told about. I took to using gedit for almost all of my text editing and taking the risk of starting OpenOffice only when the finished work needed some special feature or needed to be exported to some format OO supported and my other text editors did not. Spreadsheets were basically untouchable for me on my SUSE box; fortunately I also had a Windows operating system with Office installed on a laptop, where I wouldn't run those sorts of risks. Importing documents was always hazardous and I always made multiple copies beforehand due to OO's tendency to corrupt whatever it touched. It was, by far, the single worst piece of software I had ever used.

With LibreOffice, I have a few complaints, but they are comparative nitpicks. For instance, I don't think LibreOffice Impress is a finished product yet. I say that because embedding and triggering video files in a slide is not handled particularly well, and transferring presentations from a Linux install to a Windows version or vice versa will usually not work; only a small number of video codecs will be runnable, many fewer than the program will claim to support on either system, and attempting to go across operating systems like that even with video codecs each system is supposed to support has caused LibreOffice to terminate when I attempted it. But those terminations have been comparatively polite; LibreOffice closes without saving, rather than forcing you to perform a hard reboot of the entire machine the way OpenOffice did.

I suppose there's a chance that OpenOffice improved dramatically in the time since I left it. There might also be a chance OpenOffice works better on Windows or on other Linux distros than it did for me on OpenSUSE 11.2, though it's hard to imagine that being the case since I assume Linux users are the primary target of things like open source office suites.

But I don't think it's a chance worth taking.

[fredgiblet]

I suppose there's a chance that OpenOffice improved dramatically in the time since I left it. There might also be a chance OpenOffice works better on Windows or on other Linux distros than it did for me on OpenSUSE 11.2, though it's hard to imagine that being the case since I assume Linux users are the primary target of things like open source office suites.

I wouldn't be so sure. If you're looking to make yourself a big dog you don't target Linux. I think both OO and LO think of themselves as competition for Office, not just the Office alternatives for Linux, and that means targeting Windows first and foremost. If your product is remotely decent the Linux community will do the work of fixing it themselves, whereas Windows users will simply go back to Office.

I never had any of the issues you cite with OpenOffice, though admittedly I am a VERY light user of office apps. That being said if I didn't get a free (legit) copy of Office 2010 recently then I'd be running LO.

[Arioch]

I downloaded LibreOffice, and it's functional, if uninspiring. It looks in layout and functionality very similar to Word & Excel 2003, which I believe I still have (though I'll have to go dive for the disks in storage... I passed over them as it didn't occur to me I'd have any use for Greywind's install disks). I find the way LO Writer renders fonts to be a bit shabby.

To be honest, except for the crazy subscription pricing model, the only thing that really bothers me about Office 2013 is how it looks. I really like the Windows 7 Aero interface, and Office 2013 discards it in favor of the Windows 8 Metro blocky opaque crap. I realize that Amazon and others still sell Office 2010, but I'm not sanguine about dropping $140 on discontinued software just because I don't like how the title bar of new version looks.

Oh well, it's not something that I have to worry about right now. Photoshop and Lightwave (which are not the newest versions) appear to work fine. Though if I ever want to upgrade Photoshop, I'm going to run into similar problems... as Adobe is trying the same shit Microsoft is with subscription-only pricing models.

[Hālian]

Upgrade to a non-CC version like, say, CS6???