bill gates Archives - TheWayoftheWeb

At least it is while I’m reading my latest book purchase. I always love looking through charity shops to see what people once wanted but have let go due to changing tastes, changing fashions etc. And occasionally you stumble across something like ‘The Road Ahead’ by Bill Gates for the bargain price of £1!

For one thing, it’s hard not to be impressed when the cover was shot by Annie Leibovitz – puts all the talk of ‘rock star’ marketeers and developers now into perspective!

The other is that I’ve only skimmed the first few page so far, but there’s a lot that seems to have now come true, some stuff that may still happen and a very wise and somewhat touching prediction that people may laugh at anything the book gets wrong… Looking forward to sitting down with this and making some notes…

Oh, and if you can’t be bothered to wander down to your local charity shop, it’s available online for the cost of postage plus 1p.

Should you need an office system which sits on your laptop and doesn’t cost a penny, (or benefit Mr B Gates), then you’ll be pleased to know Open Office 2.3 is available from now, here.

There’s a host of new functionality and bug fixes, which are detail in the release notes. Suffice to say I’ve used it as a legal alternative to expensive or hacked copies of Microsoft products, and found it to be really usable, and there’s been no problems using Open Office files with MS Word files when transferring between machines, or home and work.

I’d suspect most people would have an office suite of software on which ever computer they own, but if, for ideological, updating, or ‘Ooops I’ve formatted the hard drive’ reasons you need the likes of a word processor, spreadsheet application etc, then Open Office is ideal.

The future is now…

It’s Open Office 2.3 day….