OpenOffice just recently released version 2.0. It might have improved. I use OpenOffice at home on a PC and find it adequate. Not as good as the Microsoft software, but ok. I haven't upgraded to 2.0 yet though. I don't know if it's slower on Mac. My home PC is a Athlon XP 2000+ based machine so it's pretty low end (very roughly between a 1.67 GHz G4 and a 1.67 GHz G5 in Mac Speak as far as I can tell) .

OpenOffice just recently released version 2.0. It might have improved.

I haven't really messed around with it yet, but it looks pretty much the same but with more features -- on the other hand, I recently heard that Google is throwing rafts of programmers at OOo, which should lead to some interface improvements.

I couldn't get regular OpenOffice to run on my iBook no matter what I tried. OO/J runs slow & bloated -- especially opening, it seems, but is pretty stable.

I'm thinking of getting iWork (is there a trial version I could try for cheap?) and switching to that for my word-processing, and dropping back to AppleWorks (whatever they call it now) for my fewspreadsheet needs.

I still miss FullWrite, which I thought was simple and elegant.

Theo, they ship a 30-day trial with new Macs but I haven't seen a downloadable version anywhere. If you didn't get the disk, maybe ask around among local (or, you know, here) Mac types to see if any of them have it?

Here's a query:

My portable hard drive hast starting making louder noises. Clicks and whirs and what not. It won't mount to OSX anymore and I can't get any access to my data. It is a firelite smartdisk.

Any clue?

Clicks are whirs are bad, probably a drive failure and you're hearing the drive move around the heads pointlessly.

Somehow, I've never bought Office at full price in my life. And I think I've even managed that mostly legally. Or legally at the time. Or something. So thinking of buying for an Apple machine ... it's like volunteering for the yoke after shucking it.

Speaking of which, Graphic Converter's chapping my ass. Every time I open an image in it, I've somehow convinced it to show me some "Save and Next" fripperies in the image window. I want them to go away. But I can't work out how I turned them on. Please help. [eta: never mind -- it's the thingummy in the top right of the title bar]

Also -- I've found that text applied on images with Graphic Converter look much crappier than text applied with say, PSP on my PC. I can't work out why. I do like some of the image effects though. Makes stuff complicated.

I'm pretty sure I've seen "convert to pdf" in the file menu of Word on computers-not-mine. Is that because those computers have the full version of Acrobat? Is there a way for me to convert my word doc to a pdf from here for free? I can just wait until I get on a computer with Acrobat, but I'd just as soon do it now while I'm thinking about it. Thx.

Is there a way for me to convert my word doc to a pdf from here for free?

Jesse, see my comment regarding PDFCreator here:

Eddie "Buffistechnology 2: You Made Her So She Growls?" Oct 11, 2005 6:17:12 pm PDT

It creates a "printer" that you print your Word document to and it outputs a PDF. Also? Free.

Thanks! That totally did the trick, once I figured out what to actually download. My brief google found me places that wanted my email and/or to put a watermark on my document.