Task 16: Open Office

I was relieved to find that following on the heals of such a frustrating task (see title of task 15) is a relatively painless one. I married into a word-processorless Dell. It had crashed sometime ago and lost the software it did have. My husband (see pictures between tasks 13 and 14) had been using Notepad to write his papers (or he would just go to the school library). My brother-in-law told us about Open Office and we downloaded it to the aforementioned Dell. It was hard to believe at first--"What, it's free? Nothing is free." As a result, I have been writing all of my papers on Open Office Writer this semester. It is very similar to Microsoft Word--the older version, not 2007. It's kind of a bummer because I had just gotten used to the new and improved Word, and now I'm having to go back to the old look and layout. Oh well. The only thing I had trouble with was figuring out how to insert page numbers (in proper MLA fashion) using Open Office. I finally figured it out, and I'm good to go. I just save my documents in .doc format and I haven't had any trouble with my stuff opening up in Word on the school computers. One other thing that it doesn't have that Microsoft does is the synonym function when you right click on a word. I am addicted to that function, so it's kind of a bummer not to have it in Open Office. All in all, considering that it's free, I really can't complain.

I think that the idea of open source software aligns with libraries in that it gives people free access to information--key word "free."