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Showing posts from April, 2011

Let Freemind free your mind!

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A few years back I was looking all over the place for some kind of mind-mapping tool to help me in brainstorming and organizing my thoughts. I wanted something intuitive, powerful, flexible, and free. I found nothing that met all of those requirements. Today I was preparing for a sermon and once again thought how nice it would be to not be dependent on something as rigid as an outline in MS Word. I did a quick search and came up with a few options but never got beyond the first one. Freemind is great! Here's what I've put together in just a few minutes... My creativity is much better. I'm FREE! :-)

Word 2007 for word processing? I think not!

I have always thought MS Word was a highly dependable piece of software. I've delved fairly deeply into lots of different features and have found some surprises, but nothing that I would classify as a significant bug. Until now. I was helping my wife with a cookbook as a fundraiser for our school. I had collected all the recipes from various people using a web-form (wikiforms via pmwiki) and then exported them to CSV. First MS problem, but Excel rather than Word. Excel refuses to handle multi-line values in CSV as far as I can tell. I used the same data and imported it into OpenOffice Calc and it came in without a hitch. Saved into Excel format and I had the data I wanted. Not overly pleased with M$ at this point, but importing and exporting can be fickle so I'm OK with that. We'll mark them down to a B, but it's with a comforting smile... Now I want to set up a form and merge my data into it. Each recipe includes horizontal lines, lines with right-alignment and