Office Suites, What Should You Use?

There are a lot of office suites in the professional market today with Microsoft Office being the reigning champion for years. Until recently, the only legal way to get your hands on Microsoft Office was to buy a physical copy for a decent sum of cash yet there are many alternative options these days. If you work for a large enough company, you might have a chance to get the latest office version for $9.95 from the Microsoft Home Use Program. I myself was able to get a copy using a hotmail account and a code the Microsoft Marketing Director published online two years ago but they have send quashed all those codes (I tried looking for a new one, didn't see any that worked).

As far as free, even the online versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint are available with a Microsoft Account on Office.Live.com. Even Google has their own office presence online with Google Docs for creating documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and even forms, which can even open and edit Microsoft Office documents, and all you need is a Google Account.  While Google Docs can't save the file as anything but Google's own format, you can download the files as Microsoft Office document extensions and no one would ever know the difference.

But free online Office suites aside, there is a program that is tough to beat, totally free and has the ability to do all of that when you don't have an internet connection, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice.org.

Originally made free by Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice was always a community project that formed from the purchase of StarOffice and turned open-source. When Sun was purchased by Oracle, they first tried to rebrand OpenOffice as Oracle Open Office and decided it wasn't making them money so discontinued it. After many contributors left to form LibreOffice, which has it'e roots in the original OpenOffice, Oracle gave OpenOffice to the Apache Software Foundation which has made moderate improvements to the software suite. Lately, LibreOffice has been updated more often and working on new features at a faster rate although both suites give you the same basic functionality and most users won't re able to tell much of a difference other than cosmetics.

The best thing about both suites is that both are made for Windows, OSX, and Linux. Granted, the online office suites listed above also work on any operating system that can run the web browser requirements needed. Most distributions of Linux like Ubuntu come with one of the two pre-installed.

LibreOffice Toolbar

OpenOffice Toolbar

Another good thing about both, besides them running on more operating systems than most suites, is the toolbar.  Since Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft has been re-inventing their toolbar.  More people complain about the ribbon than people who actually like it and, while I know there are people who love it, the average user who doesn't use Office that often and dislike the change for basic things.

OpenOffice and LibreOffice have a toolbar that is familiar, simple, and capable of doing everything the average user will need from an office suite, students included. LibreOffice has one that uses slightly larger icons, which I'm sure the more mature crowd will enjoy while OpenOffice has a much smaller file size. With all features installed, LibreOffice on Windows is just over 900MB and OpenOffice is just over 300MB, almost a third the size.  Granted, with today's computers, file size usually isn't an issue and LibreOffice does have more features than OpenOffice and release new versions at a much higher rate.

Source Sprays with GIMP not Photoshop

Across the web are countless tutorials on how to make sprays to be used in Source Engine games like Counter-Strike: Source and the vast majority of them use Adobe’s Photoshop which is not needed, you can use GIMP for free and be legal while using it free.

Valve’s Source Engine has a unique feature in that of player defined art called a spray that can be placed on walls within multiplayer maps.  Sprays can be anything as long as they conform to the maximum image size and are of the .tga file type if importing directly into the game.  The first set of games that supported sprays had more limitations on sizes and were all based on the original Half-Life Engine, although we’ll be focusing on the Source Engine, the successor to the the Half-Life Engine.

Here’s an image of the Source logo. It's been resized to 256 x 256 and contains transparent elements if you'd like to use it for your first run. Just right click and save it to your desktop.

Source Engine games which support sprays:

• Half-life 2 and mods
• Half-life 2 Deathmatch
• Counter-Strike: Source
• Day of Defeat: Source
• Teamfortress 2 (free to play)
• Left 4 Dead
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Portal
• Portal 2

File sizes (optimal, you can make variants)

• 256 x 256 (max of any height or width)
• 128 x 128
• 32 x 32
• 16 x 16

Free Cloud Storage, How I Use Them

There are a ton of cloud storage services out there and many different ways people use them. As a more advanced user with computers, the way I utilize these services will be sufficient for the average user to have your data backed up, reasonably, secure, and FREE.

Have Redundancy

Of the many out there, there are certain ones I "trust" and others I feel are simply a waste of time as far as free accounts go. One I won't be going into here that I'm sure is fine, even though I am not an Apple fan in any way, is the iCloud service, even though they give a typical 5GB free, most large companies (Google, Microsoft etc) give at least 15GB, especially for what they charge for hardware and software although maybe that's just the reason.

Google Drive

Of the five on my computer, one gives you virtually unlimited storage in relation to particular file types and, from my experience with clients, the types causing 90% or more of a user's data bulk, photos and videos. The service from Google isn't actually Google Drive, it's Google Photos, and free storage is limited by 16MP for photos and 1080p for videos (automatically reduced if larger when uploaded). This option is enabled by default but you can check your settings to enable/disable this option. You can learn more about the sizes and what your printing limitations might be from Google's help page choosing storage methods.

Storage wise, like most, gives you a combined storage size of 15GB for free while upgrades are pretty cheap. The word "combined" is used because Google Drive's 15GB is shared between Drive, Gmail and Photos. My favorite part of Google Photos is the Android app that automatically backs up my photos and even tells me when photos and videos are taking up too much space on my phone and deletes ones that have already backed up upon my allowing.

The downsides... The first, of course, is that the data is shared amongst the three services, a feat I've overcome due to using multiple cloud services.  Another is trash and while this can be overcome with light effort, deleted items remain for 60 days and count against your storage limit. The last is when uploading too many photos at once without putting them in a folder on upload, as this can make organization difficult. Google really needs a "Show images not in an album" option. [A temporary solution to this is to put every photo in a generic folder and use the "Move" option to make sure they are all in a folder. Putting the same picture in an album multiple times does not cause two copies to be shown.]

Personally, I use Google Drive for client data I create such as logos, websites, business cards, documents and the like. I was paying $1.99 for 100GB of space but after going through all my data I realized most of it was in photos and proceeded to move my photos to the photos section and I dropped below the 15GB mark (after I found all my photos deleted from Drive in the trash).

Mega

OneDrive