Blog Lafayette

Want to save money? You are probably not rich, so you probably don’t have huge amounts of money to throw around for everything that comes up in a normal day. The car needs gas, the house payment is always there each month, and that doesn’t count the unexpected expenses. Here is a way to save money on one item that you may need in the future.

What item? Word processing software. The best known that we all use? Microsoft Office suite. I am not here to say that there is anything wrong with Office. I think it is a great program. The problem is that it costs money to buy. Your old dinosaur computer will give up the ghost sometime and you will need an office suite to install on your new computer.

If you are not shy about learning a new program then you might want to try OpenOffice.org version 3. Why OpenOffice.org? The best reason is because it is FREE. OpenOffice is open source, meaning that it is developed by a community of developers and specifically made to be free to use by the public.

OpenOffice.org is a set of programs that will allow you to work with various office documents and files and save them as any normal type text document, presentation, or database file that you use now. The suite contains:

• Writer, a Word Processor
• Calc, a spreadsheet program
• Impress, a presentation software program
• Draw, a program that allows you to draw simple sketches or complex plans
• Base, which allows you to work with databases

OpenOffice.org has been around for years and its community of developers and users have been working together to remove any bugs as soon as they are identified and to add new abilities that are requested by users. The suite works great and is easy to learn if you are already used to using Microsoft Office. To download go to http://www.openoffice.org/ and follow the instructions for downloading and installing.

One final word. I have used OpenOffice in conjunction with Microsoft Office for several years now. I am not afraid to suggest this office suite to you. You might even be pleasantly amazed at what you can do with OpenOffice.org.

If you like to write or you are someone who needs to keep track of ideas when they come up and you are someone who is always on the move, I think you will appreciate a free service that is available to anyone with Internet connectivity and a computer or phone to connect with. The free service is called “Evernote“. It is a great service that allows you to create text, audio, and image notes that will sync up from any device that has the Evernote app installed.

Just as an example of how I use Evernote, this afternoon I had a couple of ideas that I wanted to follow up on when I finished my work day. I was traveling down the highway so I was not in a position to write my ideas down. I opened Evernote on my Droid phone, clicked “New Note”. clicked the microphone button and recorded my thoughts. All I needed to do after that was push “Save” and I was all set. This evening when I had time to open up my laptop, my voice recordings were already synced up with my laptop and I was able to follow up on my ideas hours later.

I also have the option to make a text note or to take pictures to save as a note. If I happened to see a sight that I wanted to talk about in my blog later on, I would have taken a snap of the object and saved it as a note. Easy as can be. And simple is always best, isn’t it?

By the way, this is not a paid endorsement. I just like, and use, Evernote. To see for yourself go to http://evernote.com/.