Microsoft Word is still the only game in town when it comes to word processing, though on a personal note I have to say that most recent versions are horrible and until MS comes up with something better I’m going to stick to my trusty W2000. Which is just as well because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to use Repair My Word, a freeware program that only works with older versions, up to W2003. Basically it’s a data recovery program dedicated to Word document files. It’s the sort of thing you’d wished you had when you last saw the dreaded message ‘Word cannot open the document’ or ‘The document name or path is not valid’, or worst of all, all you see is a screen full of garbage. Simply run the application, navigate to the iffy file, open it and the program will do its best to sort it out, and if it succeeds it can be re-saved as a bone-fide Word document. Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t know about you but I’m always struggling to think up new passwords for websites and the myriad of other things I need to gain access to these days. As we all know using simple words, such as names and places for passwords is just asking for trouble as they can be easily guessed by someone who knows you, or about you, or cracked using ‘brute force’ dictionary methods, so here’s something else to try. It’s called Password Bird and all you have to do is enter a special name, special word and a special date and from that it creates a good quality random-looking alphanumeric password, but made up from bits of your special words and numbers, which should make it a little easier to remember
Billed as the world’s first ‘Weather Watch’ this widget from Oregon Scientifictells you what the weather is going to be over the next 24 hours, oh yes, and it also tells the time. Quite how it performs this semi miraculous task wasn’t’ fully explained in the advance publicity blurb but it’s a fair guess that it measures barometric pressure, and by plotting a trend, can give an indication of what direction the weather is heading. In other words it is probably just a wrist barometer, though it’s just possible it picks up some form of weather data transmissions, though with a retail price of under £40 that seems a bit unlikely. Either way, in addition to the time and date it also has alarm and stopwatch functions, and just in case it fails to warn you that it’s about to rain, it’s waterproof too. Read the rest of this entry »
You might think that Microsoft Word is the only word processor in town but as regular visitors will know, this is simply not the case and there are some excellent free alternatives, including AbiWord and Open Office Writer, and they’re both Word compatible.
Here’s another one, called Atlantis, and it’s free to try for up to 30 days and it can open, edit and save files in Word’s ‘doc’ format. Read the rest of this entry »
Quite literally, this freeware utility, called Natural Word, lets you take command of Word with simple typed commands. For example, rather than hunt around the menus if you want to increase the size of a word or change the colour simply highlight the word or characters and type ‘make 12pt’, or ‘make blue’. There’s no need to memorize the commands, Natural Word will try to understand what you want. Read the rest of this entry »
Microsoft Word is still the only game in town when it comes to word processing, though on a personal note I have to say that most recent versions are horrible and until MS comes up with something better I’m going to stick to my trusty W2000. Which is just as well because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to use Repair My Word, a freeware program that only works with older versions, up to W2003. Basically it’s a data recovery program dedicated to Word document files. It’s the sort of thing you’d wished you had when you last saw the dreaded message ‘Word cannot open the document’ or ‘The document name or path is not valid’, or worst of all, all you see is a screen full of garbage. Simply run the application, navigate to the iffy file, open it and the program will do its best to sort it out, and if it succeeds it can be re-saved as a bone-fide Word document. Read the rest of this entry »
