The process is straightforward. You set up an account (for free with small charges for premium services), fill out a profile for yourself (or not, it’s optional) and upload your files.  From there you simply give someone the link on Slideshare to your uploaded presentation and your good to go!  Here are some examples:

1. A presentation on Transgender Care from The University of California:
   1. http://www.slideshare.net/FNian/primary-care-for-transgender-patients-presentation
2. How to Make Cupcakes
   1. http://www.slideshare.net/meghan1943/how-to-make-cupcakes
3. Totally Cute Overload Presentation
   1. http://www.slideshare.net/effat57/cute-and-funny

What you essentially have is a low cost broadcast platform and for the Frugal Tech that’s an awesome tool for all kinds of educational and fun things.  You could use it to

• Broadcast work presentations to other teams in your building or in other locations.
• Use it to put up technical or other information then send the link via email to someone then talk them through the presentation (important if your presentation is big or attachments are blocked)
• Use it to store your presentation to bring up at a symposium or other talk you do – you don’t have to bring the presentation with you then

Another nifty point is that Slideshare then lets you take the material and connect it to the world via Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook, Buzz, or Blogger.    You can also embed the presentation in a blog post or other web site to just show it from your site vs. having someone follow the link back to your presentation at Slideshare.  Finally you could do a voice over on your presentation and then, when someone sees your presentation there is a voiceover that essentially turns it into a webinar!   Now that is cool!

So go get frugal with your tech by getting your own account at Slideshare and share your presentations with the world!

Using it was a snap as advertised.  Simply unpackage it, plug it into the headphone jack on your cell phone, then tune your radio to 99.3Fm and voila! Hands free, high fidelity driving.  While driving while using your mobile isn’t a terrific idea, hands free is preferred over using your handset certainly and Jupiter Jack promised a remarkable opportunity to make our chatting lives on our mobile easier.

We tested the Jupiter Jack first, from our Beck’s Cafe parking lot. It worked incredibly well.  My Blackberry Curve on Verizon Wireless was clear sounding and static free.  The receiver caller in our tests had a Samsung clam shell type phone on Verizon Wireless.  I had placed the phone down on the passenger seat, turned on my phone then tuned in 99.3 and Jupiter Jack supplied the link to our car stereo to create a clear stereo sound on my receiving calls and clear sounding calls on the sending side.  It was that easy.

But before we continued our test we noticed some annoyances.   The Jupiter Jack seemed to require us to play around too much with the radio and phone so that we were listening to the radio, then getting a call, then shifting back to 99.3.   Easy enough of course but it felt awkward and just as much a distraction while driving as any other method.  But for $20 whose to argue?

We then gave it a road test and this is where Jupiter Jack failed for us.  We were driving down a major highway in the Boston Area and the Jupiter Jack transmission was garbled and static filled on the sending end and the receiving end.  Our call receiving tester was using a Blackberry Curve on Verizon Wireless as well, so we could reasonably limit the variables in our testing.   Once we did the math of having to muck around tuning in channels when receiving a call plus poor call reception and the Jupiter Jack was less a Frugal Tech’s dream and more a hassle to use; plus we’re out $20.   Jupiter Jack is a nifty idea but for The Frugal Tech an idea can’t just be cheap it has to work well; it has to be a good value for the consumer.  Jupiter Jack, unfortunately, is not.    You can read more reviews of Jupiter Jack at Amazon and at Does The Product Work.

• Trackbacks not working
• Scheduled posts not posting and reporting “missed schedule”

Then you likely have one of these three errors:

• Could not be converted to UTF-8 / WordPress should cache failed feed fetches so as to avoid overloading feed sources
• Fatal error: Call to undefined method WP_Error::__destruct()
• Cron stopped working with standard configuration

There’s three patches that can be easily applied to fix your hair pulling issues in a jiffy.  You can find them over at Semi-Logical under the post: WP 2.9 three bugs, and how to fix them.

You may also find fixes at this wordpress.org/forums support post.  Ther are three or more pages of discussions and justifiable complaints but the fixes are there:  2.9 Schedule Posts “missed”

The errors were frustrating, no question about that.  But, the wordpress community responded amazingly.  The problem happened and in 24 hours there was a fix.  Here at Beck’s Cafe we should have waited a bit till WP 2.9.1 to upgrade but we upgraded the cafe to 2.9; lesson learned on first run software.   Wordpress is open source software, free to download, has a great support community and rocks as a CMS for developing web sites and for blogs.  But, as open source, sometimes things get through the development community that shouldn’t.  None-the-less, it’s a testimony to the commitment by the wordpress community that things have been tidied up as fast as they have.   Now, I definitely need a second cup of coffee

It’s a fun and different concept and one in which you might get yourself something fun for dirt cheap; like your own roomba room cleaning robot!   It’s about 12:30PM now, so if whatever they are selling today is gone, you’ve got plenty of time to see what’s next for sale at Woot.com

We got the little wonder here at Beck’s Cafe for $10.00   It was on sale and there was an instant rebate.  How can you go wrong?   So shuffling it back to the Cafe we unpacked the little gadget and started grilling away.   Unpacking it was a snap;  just open the box, flap it down on your counter and give the grille a quick clean and  you are ready for grilling magic.  The package also includes two small trays that are oblong in shape and two spatulas.  The trays are to catch the fat that rolls off what you are cooking on your grill.  And catch fat they do since the George Foreman Grill actually sits at an angle with the back section up a couple of inches and the fat rolls off what  your grilling into the oblong trays.  The spatulas are shaped so you can easily scrape drippings or other food matter off the grill without harming the grill’s teflon coated surface.  Finally, George nicely provided a little booklet on how to use his grill and that booklet has a page on approximate times to grill your food.

The grill has a clam shell type design and has a top and bottom grill and both are heated when you plug the grill in.  Note, there is no on/off switch, you just plug your grill in to start it and unplug to stop.  Because both the top and bottom have grills that are heated, your food is compressed slightly and grilled on both sides simultaneously.  You lay your slab of meat on the grill, pull down the top of the grill and presto.  The design of the George Foreman Grill is similar to an electric waffle maker if you’ve ever seen one of those.

We first tried to grill up salmon fillets.  The handy user guide/mini-cookbook notes that salmon filets take about 4 1/2 minutes to grill up to 170 F.It took a little longer than that, about 5 minutes, and they tasted great.  Moist and juicy with a nicely grilled exterior to them.  And, a bonus, after chilled, the salmon filets tasted terrific cold.   Oh and you know how fish can make your home or cafe smell icky?   Not with the George Foreman Grill.  The smell of the grilled salmon was intoxicating!

Next up for our palate was boneless chicken breast, those grilled to perfection in about 9 min to 10 min.  The grill’s surface is large enough to acomodate two nice sized chicken breasts.  We tried steaks: yummie.   We tried hamburgers too; they grilled great but HOLY COW whatalotta fat in the tray after.   We had super lean hamburg but the George Foremen Grill showed us that even lean hamburg is a big mound of fat.

At Beck’s Cafe, we grill alot now with the George Foreman Grill.  The price is right for one now, and the food is delicious after.  Oh and one last thing.  We’ve heard the George Foreman Grill newer models are more bells and whistles and not quite as handy to use.  If you’ve got a hankering to grill, it might be best to scarf up one of the GR20B models if you can find one.

Since then a number of other free on-line webinars has popped up and GuruTube is another great one. Like ZDNet’s “At the Whiteboard”, GuruTube features knowledgeable and sometimes famous speakers on a variety of interesting and timely topics. While ZDNet tends to focus on technology, GuruTube focuses primarily on business and marketing. The webinars are 4 to 8 minutes in length and chock full of information you can use right away. A helpful bump in your knowledge. And of course, the Frugal Tech found them to be a nice value since she found them to be free and to be of good quality. A great combination. Go grab a nice iced mocha cappucino and have a look for yourself at GuruTube.

What? Fax? Do they make those anymore?

I had to scratch my brunette head and really put on my thinking cap. I mean, a fax for communication instead of email? Or IM? Or SMS? Or …. Faxing?

Well there was no budging her, she was a fax fan and that was that. If I wanted to correspond on my medical history that was going to have to be by fax (to her locked office) or I’d be outta luck. So, being a frugal femme on a budget, like alot of my readers, I started poking about and found the unlikely product, FaxZero. A web based fax service.

When you first come to the FaxZero website you immediately see something that looks scammie. I mean, it just looks cheap and likely to take your information and then spam you to death. But while it has a certain retro feel, the Frugal Tech found FaxZero to be everything they say it is. Cheap, easy to use, and reliable. In multiple tests of both the free Faxzero service and the pay-as-you-go “premium” service our faxes went through without a hitch. We have never been bothered by them in soliciting us back either. In short, the system works terrific, is very handy as it is web based, is easy to use, has a free option and is a great value.

If you need to use a fax, the Frugal Tech at Beck’s Cafe raises her mug high to FaxZero.

I’ve got it downloaded to my Curve (that’s my phone not my figure!) and gosh this is really neat. And what is the magic word this Frugal Tech girl likes with her apps? Free that’s right Automattic, the code is poetry folks behind Wordpress, are providing this for free Thank You Automattic!

You can try your own copy of Wordpress for Blackberry beta at Wordpress.org here:

7-8-09 Update
Well, I’m having that early morning coffee and posting from my hated “loved” Acer /Vista laptop to update this post.  It seems the Blackberry Wordpress app has a little bug (or a little user issue) in terms of HTML links showing.   So, here they are.  For the Blackberrry Wordpress client, you can find it at their site here.   For Crackberry, you can surf on over to their site here.

today’s reality….

Post it notes, very cool Palm Tungsten, phone with alarms, business cards stuffed into my purse, nice engineering pad, email, twitter….Certainly one of those has my todo list for today so I don’t get undone??

Well as you can see I’m less organized than I wish I were. So, thinking on what to do I read a booky called, “Getting Things Done” which was truly helpful for me. But what about a system to put my new book learnin’ to work? That’s when I stumbled on Remember The Milk.

Remember The Milk (or RTM for short) helps! In their own words:

Managing tasks is generally not a fun way to spend your time. We created Remember The Milk so that you no longer have to write your to-do lists on sticky notes, whiteboards, random scraps of paper, or the back of your hand. Remember The Milk makes managing tasks an enjoyable experience.

At first I was a little worried keeping my todo list on the web. Then I found out they have a secure connection and I choose what I make public or not so my stuff is safe. I have a list of articles I am writing for Beck’s Cafe, todo’s I have to get done for a thriving non-profit I’m on the board of, birthdays, work stuff (yeah my paying gig) and many other items. It’s terrific. Let me tell you how I used it and maybe you’ll be inspired if you aren’t organized already.

I enter todo’s in tabs, and each tab is for a specific subject area. Because Remember The Milk (RTM) lets you label any part of their system so it works for you as you can name things so they make the most sense for you. I have todo’s for work, for family, for Beck’s Cafe and so on. Once I enter an item in my todo list I then “tag” it. A tag is a special label that allows someone to group like items together. So, for Beck’s Cafe I have a tab for my article ideas and I tag all my articles for “workin’ girl” or for “frugal tech”. This grouping let’s me see all my ideas of the same tag so I can understand what I might write next. Oh and if you prefer not to use tags, you don’t have to. Early on I didn’t use them as I thought they were a bother and slowed me down, but, tags are a very helpful part. you can also color code which tasks to do before others. While this organizational process is helpful, phone text and email reminders are brilliant.

Every action item can have a due date and a reminder date and time. The reminders can be set for sending you a phone text message or sending you an email, or both! RTM’s reminders are worth the time to use their system. Yes, there are other text and email reminder systems on the web, but RTM’s tie in with your todo list makes this tool very helpful. Since using RTM I haven’t missed a single appointment for hair styling, hair removal, or those special hot dates I have … to go food shopping or get my oil changed. Pretty nifty!

You know that the Frugal Tech likes her deals so what’s the economic skinny here? Well RTM is FREE or you can pitch in $25 and get a few extra features and support their great tool. RTM can play nice with Google Docs, iCalendar tools and even is an application for your iPhone. And for free, or the $25.00 uptick you can’t go wrong. They have over 1 million users worldwide now so you won’t be a guinea pig when you try RTM.

So stop forgetting the milk and start remembering it with Remember the Milk today.

http://www.ryansaghir.com/archives/www.thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensomeandthensomemoreandmore.com

Or maybe this?

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?ovi=1&mqma
p.x=300&mqmap.y=75&mapdata=%252bKZmeiIh6N%252bI
gpXRP3bylMaN0O4z8OOUkZWYe7NRH6ldDN96YFTIUmSH3Q6
OzE5XVqcuc5zb%252fY5wy1MZwTnT2pu%252bNMjOjsHjvN
lygTRMzqazPStrN%252f1YzA0oWEWLwkHdhVHeG9sG6cMrf
XNJKHY6fML4o6Nb0SeQm75ET9jAjKelrmqBCNta%252bsKC
9n8jslz%252fo188N4g3BvAJYuzx8J8r%252f1fPFWkPYg%
252bT9Su5KoQ9YpNSj%252bmo0h0aEK%252bofj3f6vCP

Yeah one of those broken web addresses you have to copy by hand into your browser to make work. Always a barrel of laughs those are.

So what to do?
Well shrink the multi-line monstrosity above to this:

http://tinyurl.com/6

Sound appealing doesn’t it? The tool to use is called TinyURL and it takes super long URL’s and makes them shorter. You can try it out yourself at http://www.tinyurl.com We think you’ll find it handy and helpful.

But are there any downsides?
Not really as far as we can tell but then again somedays we don’t get quite enough caffeine to make our brains work properly. But others have found a voiced a key concern that being it’s poor writer etiquette to make your reader wonder where it is your new shorter, spiffy link is taking them. With phishing in vogue today that’s a valid concern of course. So a possible compromise is to show the longer link so your readers see the original and post the shorter for their web surfing convenience. Another option is, presuming your readers trust you (you are the honest type are you not?) you simply put a descrtiption near the link such as, “Click over to the wikiepdia by going to this link here” where “here” is the link to the Wikipedia article or other locations.

Are there any alternatives?
Why yes there are! DoIP will do essentially what TinyURL does with one simple twist: you can choose the suffix or last part of the new shorter URL you create. For example, a standard URL to an article in the Boston Globe looks like this:

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2005/11/03/plaintiff_alleges_alito_conflict/

Using TinyURL it looks like this:

http://tinyurl.com/2lntfq

Using DoIP it looks like this, based on your choosing the suffix:

http://doiop.com/bostonglobe

So, readers know they are going to see the article you referenced in the Boston Globe. It’s a nice touch.

“Too complicated, gotta do it on the fly from my browser”
Always a naysayer in this crowd but we’ve got you covered as well. Firefox has a addon that allows you to use TinyURL right from the browser. You can get to that add-on at this link here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/126

Like all things frugally at the Frugal Tech TinyURL is a bargain in price and usablity.  It’s free and easy to  use so it meets our tightwad desires well.  So bring back web address elegance with TinyURL, your readers will be happy they don’t have to cut and paste your long URL’s again!

One of the (many) great things about Wordpress is how responsive the community is. To that end if your running Wordpress 2.1.1 HEED this ANNOUNCEMENT from the Wordpress Development Blog:

If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.

Clearly malicious hackers still have way too much time on their hands…

• Download 2.1.1 from Wordpress.org by visiting this link HERE
• See the official notice of the 2.1.1 code risk at this link HERE
• Reach the Wordpress community support site at this link HERE

You get sent a file via email. Could be at work. Could be at home. The file provides you the information you need but now you want to do something with that file or you want to use it in another program that let’s you work the way you want to (or perhaps need to). And what happens to you? Well your stuck. Stuck fiddling and diddling trying to make it work.

This my friends is what is known as a sticky wicket. You need the file so you keep fussing meanwhile the deadline to your project ticks on whilst you are amired in file format fuss. Not alota fun.

Well NOW there is a fun way to fix your function and that way is a service called Zamzar (and did we mention it’s free, we frugal techie’s love free…too bad the cheapskate Becki won’t give us free coffee for writing this column).

How it works is very simple. You upload a file to the service by clicking the browse button on step-1. That opens a little pop up box that lets you explore your hard disk on your computer for the right file. Click on your file and it uploads it. Then you choose what you want to convert the file to. There is a HUGE list. Once complete an email is sent you telling you that the file has been converted. This whole process, even for large files, is amazingly fast. This, my fine coffee swillers, is a service that’ll take away your headaches, not cause you more.

We tested it with PowerPoint files, Word files and PDF’s and it worked flawlessly converting from one file format to another with nary a hiccup. It was the way we like our software; allowing us to quickly grasp how to use it, made our lives easier not harder, and was reasonably priced (in this case free!).

So give Zamzar a try next time you need to convert some files.  It’s a quick and frugal way to easy your file conversion madness.

High Tech Indian Dude: “So we’ll get together at say 9AM right?”
Becki: “Yep that’s great 9AM”.

*silence*

Becki: “is that 9am India or 9AM my time?”
High Tech Indian Dude: “umm, 9am my time”
Becki: “isn’t that like 1AM my time?”
High Tech Indian Dude: “I have no idea, can you make 9AM India time?”
Becki: “Umm, I’m not sure, I mean I don’t know what time that is for me”
High Tech Indian Dude: “Perhaps you can have more coffee and just be ready for our call”
Becki: *stunned silence* “Yeah well I guess I could do that; wouldn’t it be better to like pick a time that works for us both?”

With business being more and more multi-national and all of us wage-slaves taking on more tasks, having meetings in different time zones (and dimensions) is not uncommon. The problem comes in coordinating those meetings with the right times so people are actually awake at some reasonable hour for everyone and can have an intelligent, collaborative meeting.

The question is how do you do that?

At the Frugal Techie we tackled this problem with the gusto of a St Pauli Girl beer maiden brandishing steins of rich ale to thirsty Oktoberfest patrons. The answer we found was effective and cheap – key measures of a Frugal Tech’s dream!

The key tool is called Time and Date, and it’s alot of things, it’s a calendaring system, a world clock, a calendar generator, world time search, and, most importantly in our caffeine induced view, an outstanding time meeting planner.

Using the tool is a snap,

1. Click to the main page at: http://www.timeanddate.com/
2. Then click on the meeting planner option: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html
3. Then you choose your month, day and date
4. Then you can pick up to four cities to display
5. Then press the Show Timetable button and voila! A table of time zones by location. Each one lined up so you know when it’s 9AM Thursday in Boston, it’s 2PM Thursday in Casablanca.

One of the real joys in this tool is that it uses tables and color instead of graphics in it’s output. Because of this it’s easy to use and understand and it’s very fast.

So for your next conference, don’t be left scratching your head on what time to get everyone together, give Time and Date a try and make surprise everyone that you know what their time zone really is!

(Photo of clock courtesy of Elaron’s Photos, used under Creative Commons License)

I guess the real issue isn’t if some wonderful article you or I have written is going to be ripped off, it’s when. One question you might ask yourself is, why? Why steal our drivel when someone else can come up with their own perfectly drivelly drivel themselves? I thnk the answer to that question is money and time. The time to write the drivel to earn the money. And the money is earned by witless readers who go to a site that’s ripped off content and then see Google Adsense Ads and click on those. Get enough clicks and I’d imagine such a scam is worth creating hatred for yourself in the blogosphere. But there are some things you can do, cheaply we might add, to hunt down and combat these miscreants.

Lorelle on Wordpress has an excellent series of articles on the issue of Blog Content theft. Starting with her excellent series will get you up to date as to what the issue is. You can click to Lorelle’s site by clicking on this link HERE.

Spoken For’s blog has an outstanding series of free methods to fight back, and fight back hard. You can read her sad tale and then learn how to fight back by clicking to her post on this subject at her blog HERE.

(Photo courtesy of Caribb’s Photos, used under Creative Commons License)

Note Tab Pro is essentially a text editor. That’s what all word processors are and that includes Microsoft Word, Open Office Writer, Wordperfect, among others. Text editors are tools that help you put your words on paper. Over time, most text editors started to get more user friendly (a good thing) with drop down menus and GUI’s (graphical user interfaces). But then started getting very bulky. The reason they started getting bulky is the slow inclusion of desktop publishing features into the editor. Desktop publishing is about styling and making things look right and presentable and readable. Text editing is about editing text. Both when you publish to the web the bulky software is actually a drawback. You don’t need all the nice features to do what you need to do.

That’s where Note Tab comes in. There are three versions, cheapskate (or free) Note Tab Light, Note Tab Standard (for $20), and what the Frugal Techie uses, Note Tab Pro for $30.00. We didn’t review all three flavors, just the Pro version, but you can see a nifty comparison chart at this link HERE.

What we liked about Note Tab Pro and what you might like too:

• Easy to use, we opened and got typing
• Clean creation of HTML for formatting, columns or whatever you like. We write in Note Tab Pro, cut and paste to Wordpress and that’s it. No messing about with the code afterwards.
• Built in wonderful spell checker
• Unique top tab keeps multiple documents open for speedy work on them
• Amazing speed. It opens, loads and gets you going in under 10 seconds
• Does not cause our system to slow down. We have a very robust system with 1GB of RAM. MS Word and Open Office Writer sometimes slow to a crawl. Note Tab Pro always works very fast
• Unique outlining feature allows for documents within documents so you can use Note Tab Pro as a low cost project manager

We’ve only just gotten to the very basics of the package but frankly it’s a big winner and one of the most handy and most used software packages we have here! It’s well worth the $30.00 price tag and you get free upgrades, a great deal.

The source of this is ZDNet’s free, easy and quick learnin’ at ZDNet’s WhiteBoard. You can reach this fabulous service by clicking to The ZDNet’s White Board site at this link HERE. Whiteboard is basically a series of podcasts on various technologies. Everything from what is Wireless Networking, to understanding what Open Source technology is, to dealing with Demand Forecasting in Business is covered. The podcasts last from two to three minutes, are entertaining and informational. One of the best features is being able to get a transcript of the podcast for free.

Go check it out You’ll learn something new and be entertained too and for free. A nice frugal tech deal indeed!

(photo courtesy of katielips photos, used under Creative Commons License)

Want to create files in a way that everyone with a computer can read them but no one can change them, like real paper? Want to do it for free? If this intersts you, then the Frual Techie has found something you don’t want to miss. Read on to find out about PDF’s.

PDF or Portable Document Format, is something you use every week, perhaps everyday, but may not be aware of it. It is, in some sense, the standard format by which electronic paper is distributed on the web. By Electronic paper I mean a format that is not alterable but deliverable electronically.

PDF was invented by a company named Adobe Systems. Their invention is part of a number of technologies that help make the web and the documents or content that makeup the web, readable by just about anyone in the world who wishes. But readability is only half the story. PDF makes documents placed on the web unalterable, meaning the author can put them on the web without fear of them being changed. This makes the web move accessible while at the same time protecting an author’s content.

I’m sure we’ve all read a document in PDF format. You click on it and “TaDa” a little popup comes up indicating you’re doing so and presto the doc pops up perfectly integrated in your browser or via launching of your PDF reader. If your certain you’ve never clicked a PDF before, click to the Nutrition Action Newsletter site and you’ll open up a nutrition article stored on their site as a PDF at this link HERE.

PDF’s allow organizations to share documentation with other companies in a form that is pretty much universally accepted, meaning, just about anyone can open a PDF version of a document you create. What are some uses?

1. To send brochures out
2. To send newsletters out
3. For final signed versions of legal documents (after having been scanned in).
4. For reprints of articles
5. For anything you want to send and have read but for which you want no changes made or even the content reused

With all this PDF goodness you have to wonder how you get the original document into PDF in the first place. Well there’s a few ways. One way is to buy such software from Adobe themselves. You can do that by clicking to the Adobe site at this link HERE. You could also use Open Office to write your documents in. They have a built in PDF generator in their software. You can click to Open Office at this link HERE. Finally you can use whatever tool you like today and then convert it into PDF for free. That’s right FREE.

The free tool to do that in is PDF Online. You can reach PDF Online at their site at this link HERE. We’ve been playing with this tool for about a month now and it has worked flawlessly. PDF Online is a tool that allows you to upload your documents to it, then it converts them to PDF and sends them back to you! We’ve found the tool to be flawless in execution taking everything we could throw at it. It’s really a great service and lets you get the goodness of PDF in an easy and painless way. Give it a try to share your documents worldwide!

The something is Open Office. You can visit their web site at this link here. What is Open Office? Well in their own words:

Open Office.org is a multi-platform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.

Free is good, so that meets our (b) bargain criteria. What about (a) though, does it work? Most of you reading this are using Microsoft Office, AppleWorks, or even Corel Wordperfect Office. All of those are splendid options and help you get your job done. But how does Open Office stand up to those? Well a complete review is a bit out of the scope of this cappucino whipping barrista, still we can comment on a few aspects, the common ones we (and probably you) would use everyday. That is their wordprocessor (known as Writer), their spreadsheet (known as Calc) and their presensation developer (known as Impress). We use OpenOffice on an 1 GHz Intel based system under MS Windows XP with 1GB RAM.

Writer
Writer is pretty much perfect. It’s easy to use, seems to be completely compatible with Word (at least for what the average Jane does) and, best of all, with one “click” you can turn any document into a pdf with it. It’s a pretty good deal in my pocketbook! I found Writer to not lack anything that MS Word had and Writer was just as easy to use. In fact, I just downloaded the software and started it and with no training I was able to use Writer. When pulling Word documents in it’s good about 95% of the time. It seems to have problems with things like the error markup feature in Word. One of the nicest things about Writer is that there are so many formats you can save your work to, including XML. This allows you to easily and quickly post to the web. In fact, I found it to be a nice and simple tool to whip up a web page with. With the International Organization for Standards voting in Open Document Format OASIS as the world wide standard for document interchange (see the ISO press release HERE), Open Office is a perfect tool to adhere to that standard for your documents. MS Word doesn’t currently support that format.

Calc
Calc is another well done piece in the Open Office suite. It calculates everything nicely (as it better had!) thankfully so there’s no worries there. It also handles the flat file database part of using your spreadsheet well too, in terms of sorting and quick finds. Again, for what 90% of the people use a spreadsheet for, Calc is really perfect. As with Writer, there was no learning curve, I just downloaded it and was able to start using it immediately. Calc also supports the Open Document Format OASIS standards. All was not smooth sailing though. When it came to easily copying a wide are of spreadsheet cells to move formula’s around, Calc was not nearly as easy to use as Excel. That became a real frustration in using it. Calc is easily as powerful as Excel, it’s just the they implement that feature that makes it frustrating. Still the price of free can’t be beat for an excellent and full featured tool.

Impress
Impress might be the most interesting of the modules. I say that due to what I experienced one day at work. It appeared I had a version of MS Powerpoint that had some sort of bug in it such that the slides I created could not be read by some of my co-worker’s later versions of Powerpoint. As you can imagine, this caused alot of panic when we all found out during a major crunch to get a presentation out! But OpenOffice’s Impress came to the rescue. With it anyone could open whatever version of Powerpoint anyone had and then edit it. And then, either save it back as Powerpoint that anyone could then read in their later versions of Powerpoint or convert it into .pdf so that anyone anywhere could read it. Lifesaver is a mild word. I’ve found Impress to work a bit differently than PowerPoint, not harder just differently. For example, some pieces are easier, such as with tabs at the top of the area that you do your page layout in, making it simpler to move from what view to another. Powerpoint has these at the bottom and they can get confusing. Charting is also different, as full featured as Powerpoint, but feels sighty easier. As with the other two modules there was virtually no learning curve to get up and running.

So what’s not to like?
Open Office, at least running on a Windows PC, is very good, but there are some areas that I didn’t like. I didn’t like how it appears to be somewhat of a memory hog. When I’m running multiple applications at once – MS Excel, Firefox, IBM Lotus Notes database, IBM Lotus Notes email, Skype, Palm – and then run Open Office it seems that within 30 minutes or so my system will slow down. At first this wasn’t an issue but eventually it got to be a real turnoff. The only thing I can attribute it to is that Open Office, at least under Windows, is a memory hog. Running Open Office under Windows by itself isn’t an issue, it seems to get all the elbow room it needs. The other thing is that Open Office seems to open slowly. We are not talking minutes here, more like 30 seconds or so. That might be the configuration of my system, I don’t know, but it’s something to be aware of. All in all, whether an application opens in 15 second or 30 seconds for the average Jane doing work I’m not sure matters.

Open Office is free, is open source and is backed by Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, Novell, Intel and others and you just have to download it from their site @ http://www.openoffice.org

*Update 07/08/2006*
Microsoft has agreed to support Open Document Format, see Microsoft announcement at this link HERE.

There’s many different kinds to use, though they all basically work the same. You load the program onto your computer, click on the little icon, tell it where your remote host is and voila, your can start moving files over to the other computer at will and at ease. There are many you could use from for your WindowsXP desktop, such as Ipswich WS_FTP and Globalscape CuteFTP. Both are very highly rated but they will run you $39 for the package with no support. And at the Frugal Tech, we do love a bargain, so we’ve hunted down something that works as well, and, is far cheaper. Free in fact.

The program is called FileZilla and it rocks. You can learn about it from this link here. FileZilla is a fast FTP and SFTP (secureFTP, for extra privacy on your transfers) program for Windows with a lot of features. There is even a server side version (if you so desire one). The license for this software is under the GNUGPL (General Public License) meaning that it is free for you to use or to tell and give to others. Just don’t sell it, that’s a no-no.

FileZilla makes me hot ….purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr …. it’s free, it’s supported, it’s got neat license, and it works!!…….get it here, Note, there are like 4 or 5 zip programs. I was confused for like a day until I realized you only need to download the zip package that is labeled: “FileZilla_2_2_19a_setup.exe” All the others you won’t need. Download that file to your computer, then click on it and run it and you’ll be as happy as I am .
(Oh, for MAC users out there, you might want to try CyberDuck, I’ve heard it is fabulous, though I have no personal experience with it).

**update 06/17/06**  The current version as of this update is 2.2.2.4b and the right file to download is “FileZilla_2_2_24b_setup.exe”