Well, today I decided to try something totally different and installed Mepis on my extra PC. Why Mepis? Well, it's based on DEBIAN, the disto I tried earlier, so I thought this might be a nice "in between" option. Installation was a cakewalk compared to Debian--there's even an option to preview it by booting from the CD first.
Mepis recognized all my hardware and set everything up for me quickly and effectively. I even installed Firefox in under 10 minutes. Everything is intuitive and looks great.
The Mepis CD also included Open Office. This is the first time I've really played around with that software. I booted up WRITER and was a bit disappointed to see that there's still no support for "Comments" like Word. The closest thing was "NOTE," which is a bit similar, though obviously a far cry from the Word feature.
I'm going to continue to play with it and see if I like it enough to keep it. So far, I'm very impressed, though I know there are dozens of other distros to try.
notes converts word comments
notes works differently, but "note" that if you open a word file in oo with comments in it, in my experience, it converts them to the notes display.
i don't use the commenting feature enough to know--i don't use word, so this seems enough to me--but is it the display that is different?
Some Problems.
It looked radically different. I haven't tested it yet, but Word will let you make in-text comments that show up as little "post it notes" on the side of the document. Combined with Autotext, it's a very useful tool and one that I use extensively. I'll experiment with the NOTES and see if I can get a similar functionability with it.
I have a really dumb question here and I hope someone will help.
Here's the deal. I had this computer running Windows XP and it was part of my 4-computer LAN. Each of the computers has a "shared folder" which I access on any of the computers. It's useful for dropping in documents and such. Anyway, is there any way I can do this now that one computer is running Linux? This may sound stupid, but the only way I know to get files from the windows machines to the Linux box is to either put them on a disk or email them. There doesn't seem to be the same "shared folder" concept or any convenient way to just drag'n drop files onto the Linux box. Help, anyone??
notes and samba
right. the post it notes from a word doc show up as little yellow boxes. use your oo help and enter "inserting notes" into the find field. you'll see the instructions. what's nice about this is that it's not a post it note box, but a display box which has previous and next buttons.
as for sharing files, you want samba. should be in your distro.
Sharing Folders 'tween Win and Linux
My geek buddies in the Grateful Dead chat room (http://wemissjerry.org) who use Linux almost exclusively say that you have to configure the Samba module on the Linux PC. Send me an IM if you need further instructions. :o)
Sharing Folders
Well, here's the thing. On my GNU/Linux PC, I can access the shared folders from the other 3 Windows boxes. However, I can't access the GNU/Linux shared folder from the Windows boxes. Whenever I try to, Windows pops up a username and password window that refuses any logins I try to give it, and, yes, I'm sure that the usernames and passwords on the SAMBA side are accurate.
I found some tutorials on it, but they quickly got opaque (something about WINS and such). I did read somewhere that there may be problems with a cable modem setup.
It's not utterly important, but would be nice if I could figure out the proper way to access the SAMBA folder from my Windows boxes.
Notes and comments
There are a few problems with the note conversion...
1. Notes show up as little boxes, and I can't find a way to make them show up lined up on the side like Word in print-layout mode.
2. Any HTML links embedded in the comments don't work in the notes (it seems to be limited purely to text). Since most of my comments contain links to helpful resources, this is a big problem.
Other than that, it appears to work fine. It's an impressive program.
re: notes and comments
1) I believe that you can do something like this with printing. Experiment with the options available through the print dialogue box.
2) The notes feature is for straight text. So the solution is the same for email: give the url.
Meanwhile, you are going to find that there is not a complete one-to-one feature correspondence between MS Office and OO since they are different products. Each does somethings better than the other. I really enjoy the built in pdf and swf functionality in OO, and the HTML WYSIWYG (cleaner code than MS). Overall, I see them as completely comparable. And as a FOSS advocate, I'm happy to use it instead of the monopoly :)