Worth checking out
A friend turned me onto this: http://www.openoffice.org
It's an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, and it's free. From a cursory inspection, it's quite similar to Word in look and feel, and it was able to open my Word documents (full of ugly equations) and understand that it needed to interact with MathType to handle the equations, which is enough to make me happy. There is also a spreadsheet, a drawing program, a powerpoint alternative, and a database application, all of which I look forward to trying out.
Since I'm making the switch away from Windows in less than a month, along with about a million other life changes, I've been thinking it would be nice to get away from Microsoft products in general. I don't necessarily think Microsoft is evil or anything, it's more that I just think the corporate model is not necessarily the right way to go for designing products intelligently. It's just one example, and I'm sure there are examples showing the opposite, but anyone who has used both SAS and R has seen the difference. When people design things for their own use, the end product is more likely to be tailored to what the typical user wants and needs than when people design things because their (micro-)manager told them to.
Anyway, some have suggested switching to TeX, and while I generally like this kind of stuff (still using vi after all these years, after all), it's not worth getting addicted to it learning it because my future collaborators are invariably going to be using Word. So for those of you who don't or can't use TeX all the time and are hence stuck using Word-compatible software, this could be a boon. And you can't argue with the price.
Updates: Same friend found this for those who might need to put TeX equations into OpenOffice files: http://ooolatex.sourceforge.net/ And it looks like there is also an add-on equation editor called Jex that supports both TeX and MathType formats: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/software/jex/ This is the beauty of open source - if some desirable feature is missing, people can just make (and share) their own!
It's an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, and it's free. From a cursory inspection, it's quite similar to Word in look and feel, and it was able to open my Word documents (full of ugly equations) and understand that it needed to interact with MathType to handle the equations, which is enough to make me happy. There is also a spreadsheet, a drawing program, a powerpoint alternative, and a database application, all of which I look forward to trying out.
Since I'm making the switch away from Windows in less than a month, along with about a million other life changes, I've been thinking it would be nice to get away from Microsoft products in general. I don't necessarily think Microsoft is evil or anything, it's more that I just think the corporate model is not necessarily the right way to go for designing products intelligently. It's just one example, and I'm sure there are examples showing the opposite, but anyone who has used both SAS and R has seen the difference. When people design things for their own use, the end product is more likely to be tailored to what the typical user wants and needs than when people design things because their (micro-)manager told them to.
Anyway, some have suggested switching to TeX, and while I generally like this kind of stuff (still using vi after all these years, after all), it's not worth getting addicted to it learning it because my future collaborators are invariably going to be using Word. So for those of you who don't or can't use TeX all the time and are hence stuck using Word-compatible software, this could be a boon. And you can't argue with the price.
Updates: Same friend found this for those who might need to put TeX equations into OpenOffice files: http://ooolatex.sourceforge.net/ And it looks like there is also an add-on equation editor called Jex that supports both TeX and MathType formats: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/software/jex/ This is the beauty of open source - if some desirable feature is missing, people can just make (and share) their own!