Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Free Microsoft Office, well, sort of...

I hear that as of June 15th Microsoft will offer a free on line version of some of its Microsoft Office products. The idea is that you can access things such as Microsoft Word, or Excel spreadsheets, or PowerPoint over almost any computer with internet access. Google offers a similar service of storing information on line that they call Google Documents.

I've peeked at Microsoft Office Live. I viewed a document that I saved from another computer, and that worked fine, but was disappointed because I could not edit the document I was viewing without downloading a file onto that second computer, something that I would not want to do. If there is a way to edit the files through my browser without a download, I just don't see how to do it. A second disappointment was seeing a block in the left hand side of my screen that seemed to be there to advertise using the product. I don't care for the use of my screen space, and envision a commercial advertisement there in the near future.

In all fairness, both companies are the ones supplying the bandwidth to run the services, along with supplying space on their servers to store our data. Storage is cheap nowadays, but still can we realistically expect something for nothing? Still, my preference is to work in an environment free of advertisement.

It would be wonderful to be able to run Microsoft Access and Microsoft FrontPage over any computer too, but these thing are currently not available.

The service is still new, so perhaps improvements will be forthcoming.

More info....
Office Live: http://www.officelive.com
Google Documents: http://documents.google.com

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Status Update

It seems like I've been running faster and even more than usual. I've canceled several things in the course of the week to free up time and still seem no further ahead than before. Many of my family and friends have had all sorts of life issues going on lately in various degrees. Enough where I've been pulled away or at least offering an ear. Enough that it's been taking huge chunks out of my day. I'd do it all over again though, for any one of them. It seems like I'm now even farther behind. Dishes laundry, and miscellaneous chores around the house continue to pile up. The list on my planner page is completely filled. Mercury has been in retrograde. I'll blame it all on that.

I realize that this post doesn't really say a whole lot. It's here just to let you know that I'm still around, just in need of some rest and relaxation, but that's not coming my way to any significant degree in the immediate future. Maybe all I have to do is wait until the 28th when Mercury decides to get back on track. We'll see.