Updates

Apologies for not posting anything recently. I have been very busy with the start of the new university year. Since things have calmed down a bit now, I have found time to tidy up the Freeware page on this blog, as well as adding a few Linux applications to the list.

If you would like to share your favourite freeware packages with your fellow readers, feel free to add a comment to this post with a link to the web site for the software.

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LibreOffice 3.4

I have featured OpenOffice.org on this blog a few times in the past. It is a free office suite featuring a word processor, a spreadsheet program, and a presentation maker. Until recently the software was produced by Oracle Corporation, but fears that they would cease to support the project or stop it being open-source resulted in many of the programmers setting up their own project: LibreOffice.



LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice.org (now produced by Apache Software Foundation), so users of the latter will make an easy transition to the former. The application names have been carried over: Writer is the word processor; Calc for spreadsheets; Impress for presentations; and so on. Furthermore, the look and feel of the packages has changed little.



Version 3.4 of LibreOffice offers many improvements on version 3.3. There is much better memory management and less of a reliance on Java. Calc is more compatible with Microsoft Excel. But the most improved application is Impress, which flies along compared to the old version.



The continuing development of LibreOffice seems assured, whereas OpenOffice,org appears to be in limbo. For that reason LibreOffice is now my office suite of choice and I would recommend users of OpenOffice.org switch over to its latest version.

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What is that character called?

If you look around your keyboard, you will notice a number of keys with characters on that you may not know the name of. In this post I will tell you the most common names for those esoteric characters. I am only looking at those characters that appear on my UK qwerty keyboard. I will explore those special characters and symbols that don't appear on the keyboard in future posts.

¬
This is called 'not' and is most commonly used in propositional logic and mathematics. It may not appear on all keyboards.

¦ and |
'Vertical bar' or 'pipe' is used in mathematics and computer programming. It can be 'broken' or 'unbroken' as shown.

^
'Caret' a.k.a 'hat', 'wedge' and 'chevron' is used in mathematics, logic, computing and to indicate ordinals in Italian.

~
'Tilde' is used in a variety of ways, such as indicating an approximation as well as the usual suspects: mathematics, logic and computing.

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Recent freeware releases

It has been some time since I last posted on this blog. In that time there have been a number of major new software releases. These include version 4 of the Firefox web browser, version 11.04 of the Ubuntu family of Linux operating systems, and version 4.8 of the XFCE desktop environment for Linux.

Firefox v4
The latest version of this web browser sports a new look, more similar to that of Google Chrome. According to Mozilla the latest Firefox is much faster than previous version, making better use of the graphical processing unit to lessen the load on the computer's CPU. I have been running the Linux version (which doesn't have the fancy new look) for a couple of weeks and it does indeed seem to be quicker.


Ubuntu v11.04
Codenamed Natty Narwhal, version 11.04 of this Linux operating system makes use of a new default shell interface called Unity rather than the GNOME shell. This move has annoyed some users and according to some reviews the release has a number of bugs. This may induce some Ubuntu users to switch to derivative distributions: the Kubuntu with the KDE interface, Lubuntu with the lightweight LXDE interface, or Xubuntu that uses XFCE desktop environment, all of which are also now version 11.04.

XFCE v4.8
Speaking of XFCE, it has received it's first major upgrade in over two years. This is my desktop environment of choice and I looked forward to experiencing the new features including a fancy new panel. While v4.8 still has a few minor bugs, it is still usable.

If you would like to share any other recent free software releases with other readers then feel free to leave a comment with a link.

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How to compress images in Word and Powerpoint

Inserted images in Word and Powerpoint may appear small, but they are actually stored as their original size unless compressed. This can cause printing to take a long time and needlessly increase file sizes. Thankfully there is a way to compress images in both these applications.

Office 2000, XP and 2003

Open the view menu and select 'Pictures' from the 'Toolbars' sub-menu. The picture toolbar, as shown below, should appear.

Click on the 'Compress pictures' icon (highlighted in orange on the above picture).

This opens the following window.


Select 'Web/Screen' for the highest level of compression, or 'Print' for a lower level. Make sure that 'Apply to' is set to 'All pictures in document', and click 'OK'.

You may then receive the following warning. If you do, click the 'Apply' button.



Office 2007 and 2010

Click on any image to enable 'Picture Tools', and click the 'Format' tab shown below.


Click the 'Compress Pictures' button (highlighted in orange on the above picture), to open the following window.

Select whichever level of compression best suits your purposes. Make sure that 'Apply only to this picture' is not selected, and click the 'OK' button.

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Keyboard shortcut of the week: Windows 7 Taskbar

After a long hiatus, keyboard shortcut of the week returns to 'Bloody Computer!' This week, we will look at new features of the Windows 7 taskbar.

You can open any program on the taskbar by holding the Windows key [shown right] and pressing the item number on the taskbar. For example, to open Internet Explorer on the following taskbar you would press Windows Key + 1. The calculator is Windows Key + 2, and so on.


If Internet Explorer is already running, pressing Windows Key + 1 will open that session. To start a new instance of the web browser press Shift + Windows Key + 1.

You can also shift focus to the taskbar using Windows Key + T. You can then use the left and right cursor keys to cycle through the items and press Enter to open them.

You can pin new programs to the taskbar by right-clicking on the icon and selecting 'Pin this program to the taskbar'. Once the icon is pinned, you can drag and drop it anywhere you like on the taskbar.

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How to print two pages per sheet

Cutting down on the amount of paper used in printing not only saves money, but is also more environmentally friendly. Some applications offer the option of printing multiple pages per sheet of paper. In this post I will show you how to print two pages per sheet in MS Word and Adobe Acrobat Reader.

MS Word
Open the print dialogue from the 'File' menu in older versions of Word, or by clicking the Office Button in newer versions (as shown below).


Simply set 'Pages per sheet' to '2 pages' and click 'OK'.



Adobe Acrobat
Open the print dialogue from the 'File' menu.
Change 'Page Scaling' to 'Multiple pages per sheet' and 'Pages per sheet' to '2'.



OpenOffice
I found no easy way to print two pages per sheet in OpenOffice, but you can save the file as a pdf using the 'Export as PDF' tool in the 'File' menu and then open it in Adobe Acrobat and follow the above instructions.

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