David and Goliath

Interesting problem arose today. A Word 2007 document had been transferred by unconventional means and a rescue image had been made. When trying to recover the .doc with the rescue point it was said to be corrupt. Several different ideas had been attempted by the originators (very computer literate people) and they emailed me this little goody. After opening in Wordpad and seeing both text and raw data, it was off on a Google hunt. After reading several boards and attempting ideas of my own I decided to download OpenOffice, a freeware, opensource office suite as the name suggests. Through some manipulation the document was finally recovered using OpenOffice. Buttoned it up, called on the lightning fast GMail service, attached it and returned the repaired .doc to them. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

Don't you find this even a little bit interesting? Here we have the mighty Microsoft Office 2007 full whamma-jamma version not opening its own safeguard against data loss. Then we take a "free" office suite and correct the problem in a matter of minutes. It has been a while since I used this great free suite of wordprocessor, spreadsheet, etc. You can bet your sweet bippy it's staying on this machine and going on my laptop too! What a blast it is to a geek using opensource to repair a Microsoft product. Just like breaking a Windows password; don't try to use a Windows based program. Google search and find the nifty Linux application developed for password hacking. It's free too!

OpenOffice has been added to the permanent Links list on this page. And a reminder, don't come whining to me if you screw up the download or installation. It's your choice and risk. It was a breeze for me.

"I won't lie. I use Windows and enjoy it. But Steve Ballmer is a total moron."
~Kaptain Kandy