Office suites

The Microsoft Office-Suite may be the standard, but it's far from the only one available in the market. The old Windows-operating systems were sold with MS Office built-in, but today you won't get it pre-installed on any new PC, as far as I know.

I'm thinking of giving a review on different office suites, unfortunately I don't have the time to give more than just a brief right now (you'll have to come back later).

So, here it goes;

* MS Office: This is of course the market standard. I have the MS Office Professional Edition 2003 (you can order a free 30-day trial in just about any country. Start from here: http://www.microsoft.com/worldwide/ and then click on Office).
It has Access, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, Publisher and Word.

* Works: also from the Microsoft Corporation, it has the Windows 95 version of Word, I think. I have it, but haven't tried it yet.

* Lotus: Same here, I have it, but haven't tried it. It came bundled with other CDs when I bought my Windows XP. Unfortunately, it totally blacked-out my computer-screen and i had to format the whole computer. If I ever get the time to test it, I'll need to install it with the help of the support-team.

* OpenOffice.org: Now, this is the BEST! Why? Because it's FREE, and just as good as any other office-suite. It has Base, Calc, Draw, Impress, Math and Write. And the big plus is that you can convert any document to pdf, with just a click of a button!
I admit, it took me a looong time to even install it, because I was afraid since it is free there must be something really bad about it (I thought, maybe a virus...), but I have got nothing bad to say about it so far, actually. Here is the site where you can download and read more about it:
http://www.openoffice.org/

I think as VAs we should have more than one kind in our repertoire. 'Til next time, take care.

So, I finally got myself a blog. I've been thinking about it for some time now.

I hope it'll be a good marketing-tool. I'm a virtual assistant (VA), translator and writer. A VA is like a PA, secretary or clerk, but a VA works from her own office as self-employed. More can be found about VA:s at any VA-site on the net (look at my site www.virtual-writer.co.uk, or google VA).

I also translate (it's actually one of my VA-services); Swedish-English and English-Swedish, those are my strongest language-pairs, Swedish is my mother-tongue, but I hope to add to that list in the future (Arabic, French and German to English or Swedish - I am at the same level in English and Swedish, but I only translate general text).

And maybe I'll get my books published some day, or publish them myself... I do factual and children's books. I'd love to do educational stuff too.

To finish off my intro, with the private sphere; I have five children ranging from six months to seven years, whom I educate at home and a husband (I try to help him with ESL too). Pretty busy, yes.