Office Archive

This article gives a visual walkthrough of some of the new features included in the latest version of Vim. "These are not the only new features. There are scores of others like Remote file explorer which allows one to directly edit a file residing in a remote location, better POSIX compatibility, Vim's own internal grep and so on which I have not covered here because this article is after all a visual walk through of the new features in Vim 7.0. It takes real genius and stellar coding skills to create and maintain such a versatile editor and Bram Moolenaar has proved yet again that he has the necessary ingredients to qualify him for the post."

"The OpenDocument Format is an emerging file format standard for electronic office documents. Representing a triumph of common sense over the methods conceived before the rise of the Internet, ODF's goals are both exciting and controversial. Early adopters of the format include state and municipal governments in some near and far-flung places, and this makes the format's progress a thing to watch. Yet innovation theory tells us there are some hurdles we all must overcome before ODF becomes a regular topic of conversation at the ballpark. Those in the know, however, recognize that we're in about the second inning of a barn-burner. So, grab a hot dog and a beer, and settle in for a classic."

ExtremeTech has an review of Zoho Office Suite, an online office suite. The interfaces are nice to work with, but inconsistent, and some basic features are missing, such as undo for the spreadsheet. But Zoho's spreadsheet still beats Google Spreadsheets, which have no charting and no multiple document capability. Though Zoho is closer to Web 2.0 dictums, ThinkFree Online delivers a richer feature set, and 1GB of free online storage. Of course, in terms of feature sets, all of the webware still has a lot of caching up to do with Microsoft's venerable installed standbys.

OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 has been released. It contains performance improvements, improved compatibility with Microsoft Office formats, support for Intel MAcs, and much more. Release notes, download page.

Users of Microsoft Office can now choose one of the Creative Commons licenses for work created in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Microsoft and Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright licenses for creative works, partnered with 3sharp LLC to develop and test this new copyright licensing tool, known as the Creative Commons add-in for Microsoft Office.

"In the hubbub over the ODF and competing 'what you see is what you get' word processors, a long-standing alternative model of word processing systems has been mostly overlooked. The author of LyX, Matthias Ettrich, calls this approach 'what you see is what you mean'. However, it's a philosophy that you will find in many 'native' free software text-processing systems everywhere, from online 'content management systems' to book publishing. You write what you mean, then you use some type of formatter to create presentation layouts. LyX, with its integrated graphical environment, may be the friendliest place to learn it."