Things that are making you crabbit! [4]

I spookyfied Lances photo

Is that you Mrs Figg?  {{{If so I need a gif immediately- a tex avery wolf with springing eyes and one of those tongues that unrolls over the ground before there head explodes with steam out the ears will do, nothing specific}}}}

no  its not me. its a Halloween lady

I need help!!!! compuder help.
erm this is going to sound very silly..but when did that ever stop me?
I have a stupid computer with starter things that are free. I had Office Starter (I think) and it stopped working and wouldnt open. My documents are just sitting there feeling stupid. I wrote them in Wordpad and they were in Word (I think) anyway Because the flipping thing wouldnt open I uninstalled the fucker, but now they still wont open in Word document form. Do I have to download Word Starter again? and where do I find it? I had a look at the Microsoft website but they have hidden it, probably because its free. anyway help! I dont know what to do.   

I hate compuders.

why would u write in wordpad?

I suggest downloading and installing open office- as good as Word and free.

how do I do that? I mean where do I find open office?

Norc wrote:why would u write in wordpad?

dunno it seemed like a good idea at the time.  

http://www.openoffice.org/download/

is it like Word? and what can I do about my existing documents? will they be in this new thingie? i dont understand anything really. arent most documents sent by email in word?  

It works just like Word- nothing to be afraid of, and it can read most doc types, including word and notepad files.

phew cool. is it a rival to Microsoft? never heard of it before

Its anti-microsoft rather than a rival- its open source, which means lots of clever programmers put it together for free for the benefit of all humanity  

thats brilliant. thanks for that help, I am useless with anything that isnt steam powered. its downloading. got 20 minutes to go.

Yeah its quite a big file, might take a bit of time installing too. But worth it as its a full word processing package. I dont use anything else.

its got to be better than Wordpad anyways.  

Yeah, I can vouch for Open Office too.  It's great and I've used it exclusively for almost four years now, despite switching from Windows to Linux and back in that time.  One tip though: while Open Office can read most document formats, older versions of Microsoft Word have trouble with the default Open Office format.  When you first save a file, there will be a drop-down menu called "file type" or "save as type".  It's best to select ".doc" from this list as it is the most compatible format. You should do this with modern versions of Microsoft Office too if you happen to use them.

(I should note that my version of Open Office is a couple years old and the project has completely changed hands since I downloaded it, so the default file type might well be .doc now instead of .odt, in which case my advice is moot.)

Mrs Figg wrote:

Norc wrote:why would u write in wordpad?

dunno it seemed like a good idea at the time.  

Actually wordpad should be openable in *anything*.  It's in a more basic text format, usually computer geek types would use it because it can be read by programs written to do real analysis.  If you've ever read a "README" file, it was probably written in something like wordpad just to ensure anything can read it. It's one step up from notepad: you can open a .csv file in wordpad (used in Excel) but in notepad you'd just get a mess. I use the mac equivalent to WordPad - TextEdit - incessantly.

If you have some program that *can't* read wordpad generated documents, take it out back and shoot it.  

As for Open Office, it's great.  But I wish somebody would take Excel and convert it into a mathematical analysis package rather than a crap clerical package.

I like wordpad, its handy for quick notes as it takes no time to bring up whereas bringing up Word or Open Office just for a quick note is a bit of a pain in the arse.

thanks for all the advice guys,  

Openoffice looks great and I had to have a Java thingie as well. although what a cup of coffee has to do with anything. oh I know maybe it was tuckered after all that downloading and needed a break. Itll be asking for biscuits next.

 

Pettytyrant101 wrote:I like wordpad, its handy for quick notes as it takes no time to bring up whereas bringing up Word or Open Office just for a quick note is a bit of a pain in the arse.

I knew there was a reason I kept using text editors to take notes: I think my subconscious realized it would open right up but my active brain wasn't smart enough to figure out why I kept doing it.

Mrs Figg wrote:thanks for all the advice guys,  

Openoffice looks great and I had to have a Java thingie as well. although what a cup of coffee has to do with anything. oh I know maybe it was tuckered after all that downloading and needed a break. Itll be asking for biscuits next.

 

I was gonna explain Java, but decided I liked your explanation better.  

I knew there was a reason I kept using text editors- Halfwise

Yeah its especially true if, like me, you tend to have one or more processor and memory  intensive programs already running- thats when notepad is very handy indeed.

whats the best typeface to use? theres loads to choose from. Is there a standard one. whats Rich Text?

theres more doofus questions from where they came from I can tell ya.  

I just stick with Times New Roman for the most part. Sometimes Arial. Those are widely-used standards; I wouldn't get too fancy with typefaces.

Ah.  Use whatever type face floats your boat.  If a computer doesn't have it, it will go to a default in most cases.  Times New Roman, Arial and Courier are on most computers.

As for rich text, okay let me tell ya.  The way most word processors work is they have hidden keywords that tell the processor to make an indent, italics, or any other type of formatting.

The original computer codes had 128 characters (binary) which included all versions of the alphabet cases and numbers, extra characters, and some basic formatting characters. This is called ascii code,  you can see the table here: http://www.asciitable.com/   An ascii document is just a string of binary numbers representing what you write plus formats, and can be read by anything.

preceding the advent of MS Word, Microsoft developed rich text, which uses tags rather like what you use to format the messages in this forum (bbcode) where you might use "(b) say sumt'in (/b)" to make something bold (though I used () instead of [] to make it appear)

So if you import a rich text document into an ascii text editor that doesn't have rich text (such as notepad) you might see these tags.  Same with an html file that also uses tags, in fact I use text editors when I make webpages so I can see what I'm doing.

MS Word and the equivalent use an even more complicated system that can't be read in text editors, since the characters go beyond the ascii code.