7 Best Alternatives To Microsoft Office Suite — 2019 Edition

On 12/7/2019 7:46 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Blake" wrote

| If you're happy with that, that's fine. I won't try to convince you to
| change. But I'll just point out that I can do a search within Quicken
| and find what I want *much* *much* faster than you can thumbing through
| a file of receipts.
|

Well, yes... assuming you have a secretary who's
entering all that data into the program in the first
place.


No, I don't. I enter some of it myself, but much of it gets entered by
Quicken's one-step update feature.


--
Ken

On 12/8/19 6:53 AM, Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Springer" wrote

| Yes. The attention to detail is a delight. I'm not
| wild about hiring a 12-year-old girl to design cutesy,
| Looney Tunes icons, but aside from that it's almost
| astonishingly tasteful.
|
| Imo, the quality of the icon design has gone downhill over the last few
| years. Not just Apple, but every where. They are no longer visually
| intuitive.
|

That's odd, isn't it, given that they're often bigger and
could have more detail. I saw a Microsoft icon recently
that was something like a blue oval topped by a blue disk.
It's supposed to represent "people". Maybe that's an
internationalization thing. If they got any more specific
someone might complain about sexism, racism, hair-colorism,
fattism, thinnism, or some new ism. So icons are becoming
like symbols on car dashboards. They're a great equalizer
because no one understands them.

How about the icon that is the upper half of a circle with a small
circle on top that's supposed to represent a person? I drew better
stickmen in elementary school. LOL

| A few years ago I tried Suse and noticed that was
| also much better looking on the same hardware as
| Windows. I don't know why Windows graphics are not
| better. But it does seem that with Mac you get better
| display and better design. Maybe MS make a point of
| making it look generic. Like a pickup truck or sedan.
| The design says, "get something done".
|
| Since the hardware was the same, isn't that an indication the answer is
| in the quality of the driver's code?
|
Certainly seems that way. But Microsofties seem to
write brilliant code, from what I can see. So it doesn't
seem to make sense.

"Microsofties"... meaning all programmers writing code for Windows, or
just MS programmers?

| The current iMac, and device screens are the retina design. I don't
| know what that means at the techno level, other than it's proprietary
| tech at some level.
|
It seems to refer to any screen that has the blessing
of Saint Jobs. There are different versions. From what
I can gather they're calculating how many ppi a device
should have based on size. Again, wonderful attention
to detail. Thus the extremely crisp display even on a
small phone.

I looked at a couple 4K screens connected to a Mac at a Micro Center
store. I thought one of them was better than an iMac sitting next to
it. But the size, both physical and financial, was more than I could
handle.

| I've heard a similar story, but Jobs sued MS over stealing his UI
| design. But someone pointed out that Xerox had the design before Jobs.
|
That could be. Lawsuits have always been an Apple
business strategy. They sued Samsung over slide to unlock
and round corners. I once saw a photo online of an
old, wrought iron slide bolt on a door. The caption read,
"Apple so invented slide to unlock."

** I may be reaching the limit on my posting ability.
Everyone will make fun of me, of course, but I'm using
OE6 and at some point it just rejects the header length
if a thread goes too deep. I've never found a way to
fix it. But I love OE for most things and don't much like
TBird, so I put up with it.

Have you looked at other alternatives?


--
Ken
MacOS 10.14.6
Firefox 70.0.1
Thunderbird 60.9
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On 12/8/19 9:38 AM, David wrote:
On 08/12/2019 14:08, Ken Springer wrote:
On 12/8/19 6:35 AM, Mayayana wrote:
"Rene Lamontagne" wrote

| nonsense.
|
| Nonsense is a communication, via speech, writing, or any other symbolic
| system, that lacks any coherent meaning.
|

Â*Â*Â* If you don't know nospam then you need to. He's
either a compulsive arguer or a discussion bot
designed by researchers to study social patterns.
If you look at his posts you'll see that he never fails
to have the last word, appears to be knowledgeable,
yet rarely actually says anything. (Though he's very
consistent in his AppleSeed devotional wrath.)

He and his type are the reason I don't read the Mac newsgroups any more.

David, your reputation is not one to be proud of either.

He - or she - *IS* a difficult *type*! No doubt about that!

Can you tell me a bit more about your experiences on "Mac newsgroups"?
If you are referring to Usenet groups, to WHICH groups do you refer, Ken?

You have to ask?

What has been your experience on the Apple Support Communities
forums/groups been like? Have you just asked questions or have you tried
to help others too?

I visit forums only when I need answers. The forum format is a time
waster, and I don't have the time to waste on using them.

'Nuff said.


--
Ken
MacOS 10.14.6
Firefox 70.0.1
Thunderbird 60.9
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On 12/8/19 9:16 AM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Sun, 8 Dec 2019 14:09:30 -0000 (UTC), Roger Blake
wrote:

On 2019-12-08, Char Jackson wrote:
It's not hard to tap, double tap, long tap, swipe up/down/left/right, and
those are just about all the things you need to master.

I don't have time for that crap. I loathe touch screens.

When I'm sitting in front of my computer and my phone is also within reach,
it's the phone that I reach for 9 times out of 10 because I get my answer
so much faster on the phone. I can type a word at a time rather than a
letter at a time, or better yet, I use voice input and don't have to type
anything at all. If you don't have time for that, you surely don't have
time for standard PC (kb, mouse) input.

Have you ever tried voice input? It's something I've wanted to try for
a long time, but it's low on the priority list. The coupe times I've
tried it, I've found it difficult to find a list of the voice commands
available to the user.


--
Ken
MacOS 10.14.6
Firefox 70.0.1
Thunderbird 60.9
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On 08/12/2019 17:34, Ken Springer wrote:
On 12/8/19 9:38 AM, David wrote:
On 08/12/2019 14:08, Ken Springer wrote:
On 12/8/19 6:35 AM, Mayayana wrote:
"Rene Lamontagne" wrote

| nonsense.
|
| Nonsense is a communication, via speech, writing, or any other
symbolic
| system, that lacks any coherent meaning.
|

Â*Â*Â*Â* If you don't know nospam then you need to. He's
either a compulsive arguer or a discussion bot
designed by researchers to study social patterns.
If you look at his posts you'll see that he never fails
to have the last word, appears to be knowledgeable,
yet rarely actually says anything. (Though he's very
consistent in his AppleSeed devotional wrath.)

He and his type are the reason I don't read the Mac newsgroups any more.

David, your reputation is not one to be proud of either.

Your answer surprises me, Ken! shock

Perhaps you are unaware that trying to uncover 'bad guys' is fraught
with difficulty? The poster known as 'Diesel' has spread all manner of
misinformation about me because I exposed him ....
.....as a *real-life author of viruses*.

Similarly, the MASTER-*stalker* called Beauregard T. Shagnasty has even
set up a spiteful web page because I exposed his whole website to be
carrying malware. Proof he https://i.imgur.com/JCa39b8.jpg

He - or she - *IS* a difficult *type*!Â* No doubt about that!

Can you tell me a bit more about your experiences on "Mac newsgroups"?
If you are referring to Usenet groups, to WHICH groups do you refer, Ken?

You have to ask?

Yes, I do. I cannot find you on the 'uk.comp.sys.mac' group for example.

What has been your experience on the Apple Support Communities
forums/groups been like? Have you just asked questions or have you tried
to help others too?

I visit forums only when I need answers.Â* The forum format is a time
waster, and I don't have the time to waste on using them.

'Nuff said.

At OUR time of life, we ALL have somewhat limited time!

I hope you actually GET to /your/ three score years and ten! ;-)

You might like to pass on this snippet to your loved ones:-
https://i.imgur.com/CRK3SPN.jpg

On 08/12/2019 17:36, Ken Springer wrote:
On 12/8/19 9:16 AM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Sun, 8 Dec 2019 14:09:30 -0000 (UTC), Roger Blake
wrote:

On 2019-12-08, Char Jackson wrote:
It's not hard to tap, double tap, long tap, swipe
up/down/left/right, and
those are just about all the things you need to master.

I don't have time for that crap. I loathe touch screens.

When I'm sitting in front of my computer and my phone is also within
reach,
it's the phone that I reach for 9 times out of 10 because I get my answer
so much faster on the phone. I can type a word at a time rather than a
letter at a time, or better yet, I use voice input and don't have to type
anything at all. If you don't have time for that, you surely don't have
time for standard PC (kb, mouse) input.

Have you ever tried voice input?Â* It's something I've wanted to try for
a long time, but it's low on the priority list.Â* The coupe times I've
tried it, I've found it difficult to find a list of the voice commands
available to the user.

Surely you use SIRI?

https://www.apple.com/uk/siri/

I works like ...... *Magic*. :-D

In article , Ken Springer
wrote:


When I'm sitting in front of my computer and my phone is also within reach,
it's the phone that I reach for 9 times out of 10 because I get my answer
so much faster on the phone. I can type a word at a time rather than a
letter at a time, or better yet, I use voice input and don't have to type
anything at all. If you don't have time for that, you surely don't have
time for standard PC (kb, mouse) input.

Have you ever tried voice input? It's something I've wanted to try for
a long time, but it's low on the priority list. The coupe times I've
tried it, I've found it difficult to find a list of the voice commands
available to the user.

you can't find a list of commands because there are none.

it's designed to use normal everyday language, and not just english
either.

ask a question and get an answer, just as you would if you asked
another person, no special commands or lingo required.

the only thing to know is the trigger word to activate it, which is
obvious from which assistant it is (google, siri, alexa, cortana), or
tap/click the appropriate button.

for dictation, speak and it transcribes, normally quite accurately.
nothing is perfect, even a human taking dictation will make mistakes.

it also understands context. for example, if you ask "how high is mount
everest?" and then ask "where is it?" it knows you meant mount everest
because you just asked about it moments earlier. this works great for
math, where you can refer to a previous result without having to repeat
it.

David the Liar of Devon wrote:

Similarly, the MASTER-*stalker* called Beauregard T. Shagnasty has even
set up a spiteful web page because I exposed his whole website to be
carrying malware. Proof he https://i.imgur.com/JCa39b8.jpg

False positive by a tool you don't understand.

Six *more* months added to the lifespan of your _special page_.

Will you never learn?

--
-bts

"Ken Springer" wrote

| "Microsofties"... meaning all programmers writing code for Windows, or
| just MS programmers?
|

MS programmers. The actual software they write usually
seems very clean and well done to me. Windows is amazing.
IE is amazing. Their tools are amazing. Without the greed
and strategizing it could be an incredible system. Though
there are some exceptions. The people who wrote the
scripting runtime (scrrun.dll) made quite a mess of it. And
of course IE is an ungodly mess, but that's only because
of Microsoft's ulterior motives. The actual software is
brilliant and beautifully put together. And they've been way
ahead of their time on multiple occasions. (The SPOT
watch could have beat the iPhone to creating the Dick
Tracy era, if only the wireless access had been there and
the thing hadn't looked like a tin potato.)

| ** I may be reaching the limit on my posting ability.
| Everyone will make fun of me, of course, but I'm using
| OE6 and at some point it just rejects the header length
| if a thread goes too deep. I've never found a way to
| fix it. But I love OE for most things and don't much like
| TBird, so I put up with it.
|
| Have you looked at other alternatives?
|
A bit. But I really can't be bothered. There's nothing
but TBird that's completely an email and newsgroup
program. There are various discontinued things,
newsgroup readers for fanatics who want colorcoded
commenting.... But nothing that's just a good, solid,
well supported tool. My first choice would be TBird but
it has lots of things I don't like.
I think the problem is that most of the people who
might write this stuff switched to gmail webmail a
long time ago. Then they switched to texting. And now
they don't care. But as much as people make fun of OE
I find it to be very solid and does pretty much
everything I want. My only real complaint is that the
filters are a bit flimsy. But TBird's are worse.

"Mayayana" wrote:
** I may be reaching the limit on my posting ability.
Everyone will make fun of me, of course, but I'm using
OE6 and at some point it just rejects the header length
if a thread goes too deep. I've never found a way to
fix it. But I love OE for most things and don't much like
TBird, so I put up with it.

OE is a fine mail & news client but does have its problems like the
one you mention. The line length limit is 998 chars (RFC 2822) and
OE should really be wrapping the "references" header line like other
newsreaders do. Currently, you are about half way to the limit.

If you get the "line to long" error, save your unsent reply as a
".nws" file, open in notepad and delete all but the last MID in the
"references" line. Then add the header "X-Unsent: 1" and save. Now you
can open in OE and treat as any normal message in composition.

I've done it with this message as an example.

"Carlos E.R." wrote

|
| Another problem is that UTF-8 may or may not have a
| BOM.
|
| What is a BOM? Google says "Bill of materials".
|
| Another source says "Short for byte order mark, BOM is another name for
| the Unicode character at the beginning of a file indicating if it's
| UTF-16 or UTF-32."
|
Yes, byte order mark. Though I'm not certain that's
what it's called in UTF-8. It is in 16-bit because it could
be either high or low endian. Notepad prepends EF BB BF.

| To me it seems that the real motive is political correctness.
| Inclusiveness. For us English speakers that's not a reason
| to use it.
|
| You are not the only people on Earth, you know. It is just polite to
| consider our existence.
|
Yes, but here we are, speaking English. If you and
I were having coffee together I'd try to be considerate.
I'd even enjoy trying to resurrect my 4 years of Spanish.
I enjoy Spanish. It's more sensual than English. More
curvaceous and less thorny. I feel more alive with Spanish.
English is good for saying things like "particular mathematical
anomaly". Technically proficient but not so aestheticly
appealing.

But on my own computer
there's no reason to have non-ASCII files. ASCII is
English. If you had invented computers then ASCII would
probably be Spanish, and I'd have to learn Spanish in
order to do programming. Then my computer would
be full of Spanish ANSI files. But if I change my ASCII to
UTF-8 I'm just adding lots of complications for no reason.
Similarly, if a webpage is in English only then there's no
sense mucking it up with a few token UTF-8 characters.

| Even Windows default to unicode.
|

Yes, but only internally. I don't have any unicode files,
unless you count the mess that makes up a DOC file.
With English, again, it doesn't matter whether it's unicode.
Only the first byte matters, and that's ASCII-conforming.
With foreign languages it's usually ANSI. So unicode was
brought in to prepare for the future, but it was never
really relevant. And now it's been obsoleted by UTF-8,
which is much less disruptive and much more functional.

"Ken Blake" wrote

| Usenet has not upgraded the standards for the headers. It is considered
| extinct by most, so why bother?
|
|
| Considered extinct by some people, but not by most. Most people never
| heard of it and don't even know it exists.
|
That's true. We should probably start a Facebook and
Reddit group to popularize Usenet.

In article , Mayayana
wrote:


| "Microsofties"... meaning all programmers writing code for Windows, or
| just MS programmers?
|

MS programmers. The actual software they write usually
seems very clean and well done to me. Windows is amazing.
IE is amazing. Their tools are amazing.

you clearly haven't looked at much else.

Without the greed
and strategizing it could be an incredible system. Though
there are some exceptions. The people who wrote the
scripting runtime (scrrun.dll) made quite a mess of it. And
of course IE is an ungodly mess, but that's only because
of Microsoft's ulterior motives.

how can ie be both clean, well done and amazing as well as an ungodly
mess at the same time?

The actual software is
brilliant and beautifully put together.

compared to what?

And they've been way
ahead of their time on multiple occasions. (The SPOT
watch could have beat the iPhone to creating the Dick
Tracy era, if only the wireless access had been there and
the thing hadn't looked like a tin potato.)

no it very definitely couldn't.

On 12/8/2019 12:10 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Blake" wrote

| Usenet has not upgraded the standards for the headers. It is considered
| extinct by most, so why bother?
|
|
| Considered extinct by some people, but not by most. Most people never
| heard of it and don't even know it exists.
|
That's true. We should probably start a Facebook and
Reddit group to popularize Usenet.



Go ahead if you want to, but I won't join you there.


--
Ken

On 2019-12-08, Char Jackson wrote:
When I'm sitting in front of my computer and my phone is also within reach,
it's the phone that I reach for 9 times out of 10 because I get my answer
so much faster on the phone. I can type a word at a time rather than a
letter at a time, or better yet, I use voice input and don't have to type
anything at all. If you don't have time for that, you surely don't have
time for standard PC (kb, mouse) input.

I don't have, or want, a smartphone. I do not want "smart" devices that
"get to know" me, and prefer to type (I'm a touch typist) rather than
input via voice. Using a standard PC takes little time. I have no time
to learn the asinine nonsense required to "tap here, tap there, then
stand on your head and **** nickels" in order to get things done.

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roger Blake (Posts from Google Groups killfiled due to excess spam.)

NSA sedition and treason -- http://www.DeathToNSAthugs.com
Don't talk to cops! -- http://www.DontTalkToCops.com
Badges don't grant extra rights -- http://www.CopBlock.org
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------