A Full Conversion

I'm making the final conversion -- away from Microsoft. More and more, there are suitable substitutes being released for the monopolistic software from Microsoft that has become the standard in so many ways.

A year ago I switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox. Firefox is faster, more secure, more feature-rich, and customizeable. And free.

On occasion, I use the Mozilla browser formerly known as Netscape (the current Netscape suite is fully redesigned) in addition to Firefox. For example, when I wish to access my personal Google account and my work account at the same time, I open one in Firefox and one in Mozilla browser. Cost: free.

A few months ago I switched from Outlook Express to Mozilla Thunderbird for email. Thunderbird, too, is more secure than its Microsoft counterpart. It also fully supports RSS feeds, providing the convenient feature of reading my email and RSS feeds in one application. Again, it's free.

Like most professionals, I use Microsoft Office applications -- Word, Excel, and occassionally Powerpoint -- at work. Naturally, I have my own personal copy at home so I can transfer files between home and the office. I also use Dataviz Documents To Go on my Palm PDA, which allows access to the same Word and Excel files wherever I go.

Last night I came home from work to learn that the Microsoft Office applications on my PC had become corrupted. I couldn't load Word or Excel, and even Adobe Acrobat Reader -- admittedly not a Microsoft application -- was corrupted as well. I tried to reinstall Office, but received an error that the installation program on the CD was invalid (it worked fine during the initial installation).

I updated and ran my antivirus software -- clean. I downloaded and reinstalled Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0 successfully. I attempted to uninstall Office, but it was no longer listed in the Add/Remove Programs list, so I deleted the Office folder from the hard drive.

Finding no fix for the Microsoft Office issue, I gave up and looked for alternate solutions. In addition to Office, I have Lotus SmartSuite, and Corel WordPerfect Office installed on my PC. Both will open Word and Excel documents, but the Word documents I need to access don't format properly in these other programs.

I remembered that I recently downloaded Portable Abiword, a free word processor that will open and save in Word format, but again some formatting errors.

But I didn't give up there. To my great pleasure, Google, which has long been my search engine of choice, recently purchased internet startup Writely, a full-featured web-based word processor that is fully compatible with Microsoft Word, among other formats. I was a Writely member before the Google acquisition, and signing in again was effortless.

To make things even better, this week Google launched Google Spreadsheet, a dynamic Excel-compatible web-based spreadsheet program that is currently in limited trials. I requestd an invite and was quickly accepted.

I now can access Word and Excel files from any internet connected computer, even if Office isn't installed. And since my files can be stored on Google's servers, I never have to worry about leaving my disk at home. And best of all, they're both free.

Now if only the Google OS rumours were true, I could dump Windows and be Microsoft-free forever.

Joe