New features:

• Faster start-up times
• Compatibility with MS-Office 2007 documents
• Better Compatibility with MS-Office 97, 2000, XP documents, encrypted with a password
• Importation of dynamic tables from Excel
• Comments are now possible in the Impress presentations
• Improvements to the Calc cells handling (cell merging, sorting, etc.)

For Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux.

Here comes PDF-to-Word, touted as “The Most Accurate PDF-to-Word Converter”, which may be quite right.

It’s online, it’s free, it’s only 3 steps away:

PDF-to-Word (free online converter)

The converted document will arrive directly in your email box.

Keen eyes like yours will have noticed the opportunity to produce not only Word documents but also RTF documents which can be read as easily in Word as in any other word processor on any kind of machine.

Those are the best links I found recently. I could not write a full post about them, but they are worth visiting:

• Box.net launches a web-based free word processor (via Download Squad)
• Histoface: How to hide an image in the histogram of another image
• Safer Code – Secure Coding In C \ C++ is a blog about such issues as writing clean C/C++ code.

Most-read articles

The news as you make it:

• Download free Nero 8
• Sharks and other sea jaws
• Art Nouveau Design

Most visited categories

Your attention does not stop to 1 post only:

• Gorilla in Wildlife (digital photography)
• Nikon D300 (SLR photo camera) that can be complemented with the YLovePhoto.com similar category about the Nikon SLR family

But, a found another option for free MS-Word: ABI Word is an open source word processor available for quite some time, but the latest version (v2.6.5) is now compatible with all the meaningful file formats like MS-Word 2007 and OpenOffice.org Writer. These XML-based file formats are usable in this freely downloadable word processor.

I do not use it by myself, but it looks good enough to check it if you want a pretty neat word processor solution to replace your MS-Word for free.

• “Impress: Using Master Slides” explains how to use master slides in order to make a presentation look better and more homogeneous.
• “Mail merge in OpenOffice.org” : Doing mail merge from a desktop software suite like OpenOffice.org is not often easy on the first time. So, why not be guided by an expert?

OpenOffice.org v3.0

The new features are quite noticeable:

• Support of MS-Office 2007 format for documents
• OOo 3.0 is now compatible with Mac OS X
• New multi-page mode in Writer
• Several users can now simultaneously edit and share a single spreadsheet
• Capacity to use MS Access databases from Writer

To freely download your MS-Word 2007, your MS-Excel 2007, you just have to run to the OpenOffice.org web site. This is free, this is legal!

Google Chrome

How could we ignore the launch of Chrome, the new browser from Google? Every is babbling about it, everybody tried it (it can be downloaded here).

But after one test run, I believe that I should explain something. Yes, this is a marvellous browser because it takes most of the good things from FireFox, Opera or Safari (all IE competition). I immediately noticed:

• No space is lost in useless graphical waste, everything is concentrating on user display,
• The good tab management,
• The impressive performance,
• The name-completion in the address bar.

Some will also have noticed the more technical features like:

• The separation of applications running in different tabs,
• The very small footprint (including for the Javascript).

But, all this is hiding a very critical reality: Google did not even try to make a mere browser (it even lacks a simple RSS feed manager). They are more interested in doing more than Internet Explorer competiton. Much more.

Chrome (tasks)

The impressive advantage of this browser is elsewhere: it will fight against Microsoft applications allowing to work online in the best possible conditions. Chrome is nearly an Operating System competing with Windows. Yes, because where Windows offered a vehicle to sell Microsoft Office, Chrome will allow Google to develop a wider range of online tools in the path opened by the Desktop applications and GMail.

It will hurt Microsoft real bad. Chrome is obviously the best browser to support this approach. Rock solide, fast (very), reliable and able to support application crashes.

Microsoft Office 2007 Templates

Free legal download.

• Five important security apps for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows
• Superior Alternatives to Crappy Windows Software
• The Windows Apps You Never Need To Install
• Battle of the Free Windows Software Firewalls; We have to admit that there is no longer any good reason to pay for your computer security under Windows.
• Top 100 of the Best (Useful) OpenSource Applications
• Logiciels gratuits from TutoWeb.
• Now, to look into the future, Sneak peek at OpenOffice.org 3.0
• And, last but not least, for old dinosaurs, let’s remind you that you can still use VAX-VMS on your Linux PC. If you don’t know what I am saying, either you’re too young, or you never received a hacker education. Or both.

Source: Ironic Sans.

But there’s more:

• iphone@pdfonline.com to convert from Microsoft Word or Visio to PDF file
• doc@koolwire.com to convert from PDF to Word or RTF file
• mp3@koolwire.com to convert from WAV to MP3 format
• wav@koolwire.com to convert from MP3 to WAV format

Solution (partial because you still need to do something): Crunch all documents through a software to make them readable. This is basically the offer from Docx2RTF, Windows utility that you can download freely.

So I decided to add a spell checker to Opera (a plug-in to limit the risks of my own typos). I found a pretty simple one: Aspell for Windows that Opera will automatically recognize when it is installed. It has dictionaries for many languages (it is easy to create one from a mere word list in your own language if you need to). It supports several languages at the same time.

The only drawback is that it is not working in real-time, but you have to call it from a right-click on the mouse into the post box. I would have preferred an active underlining of wrongly-spelled words (like in Word or OpenOffice-Write).

May be you know a better one that you would like to share…

Note for new bloggers: Even if I have been waiting long for this, typos in your posts just pushes forward a bad image for your own web site. Go and correct this now.

Source: http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/opera/spell check/.

Up to now, you had the possibility to use Open Office (which just went to version 2.3). This free desktop suite is compatible with Microsoft file formats (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and gives you the ability to do nearly everything that PowerPoint does. And -we have to admit that- we do not use a lot from PowerPoint (bullet lists and titles).

But Google joins the race with the arrival of Google Presentations, which their online answer and free again (and more legal than any botleg copy downloaded from BitTorrent, DirectConnect or similar P2P network). There was already a Google Docs application suite; It is now complete.

Have fun with your free download of… PowerPoint competition products.

Steal Office!

MS-Office is still out of reach for normal people around $400 (for this price you can consider buying a computer). But Microsoft hides behind this slogan a proposal just for students starting September 20th: $60 for MS-Office, it’s a steal.

Not sure this is really a steal, I keep recommending to download OpenOffice for free…

However, you can download the excellent Neo Office for OS/X (a Mac OS/X port of OpenOffice). It’s now available.

This is now time to prepare the next one: Only one month left to collect the examples of the worse punctuation and to find ways to improve the situation.