Open Office REALLY is Better

A few months ago, I wrote an article on OpenOffice, a free office suite comparable to Microsoft's Office software. It contains programs such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation maker, etc...

This week I found myself implementing a spreadsheet for a somewhat complicated electrical engineering problem. It involved writing some computer program code in a language called BASIC, which essentially allows a user to create their own functions. Since the company where I work uses MS Office, I wrote my initial draft of the spreadsheet in Excel.

After a few hours of work, I came across something strange. My new functions were appearing to work correctly, but my final numbers were way off. After hours of debugging with another co-worker, we finally found out that MS Office was not allowing me to use the number pi, even though using pi works just fine when you type it straight into the Excel sheet. Ugh...

Later that week, I decided to re-create the spreadsheet in OpenOffice's Calc (the equivalent of Excel). To my surprise, many of the functions that I had to create myself were already included in OpenOffice! I tried using Pi, and it worked perfectly.

Now, anyone who tells you that OpenOffice is inferior to Microsoft's Office is badly mistaken. I know this from experience in dealing with both of them at a very deep level. If you are still paying hundreds of dollars for MS Office, you're wasting your money. Get OpenOffice for free, tell your friends to get OpenOffice for free, save hundreds of dollars, and support the open standards that OpenOffice provides.

Gmail Features Everyone Should Know

Google's Gmail is by far the best web-based email system to date. In fact, I prefer it to any other email client that is on the market, including programs such as Microsoft's Outlook or Mozilla's Thunderbird. It's quiet design is refreshing, and the threaded conversations keep your inbox nice and tidy. On top of the great design, there are some powerful tools that allow Gmail users to organize and track their email very efficiently. Let's face it, most of you use your email multiple times every day. Isn't it worth a little time learning how to get your Gmail running like a well oiled machine? If you don't have Gmail, you can sign up for a free account if you'd like to try it.

Trick #1: Tracking Your Email with a "+"

When you add a "+sometexthere" to your email address in Gmail, it will still arrive in your inbox. For example, let's say that your email address is bob@gmail.com. Sending an email to bob+doublestamp@gmail.com, or bob+anything@gmail.com will still send the email to bob@gmail.com. Why is this useful? Because you can track where people are getting your email address from.

Next time you go to sign up for something on the internet, add a "+website" to your email address. For example, if you are signing up for ebay, you could sign up using the email bob+ebay@gmail.com. Now, if you start receiving tons of spam, all of which are addressed to "bob+ebay@gmail.com," you will know that ebay shared your information with other companies!

Note: Sometimes websites won't allow you to place a "+" character in your email. If this is the case, use trick #2.

Trick #2: Dots don't matter

Dots in Gmail addresses are ignored. That means that if you send an email to double.stamp@gmail.com, it's the same as sending it to doublestamp@gmail.com or d.oubl.e.st.am.p@gmail.com. This can be handy if the "+" is not allowed by a website to which you are signing up. Instead, you can add dots in certain places, then write down where you put them for a given website. For example, if you sign up for ebay, you could use b.o.b@gmail.com instead of bob@gmail.com. If you start getting spam addressed to b.o.b, then you know that ebay spilled the beans on you.

This trick can be useful to sign up for multiple accounts on the same website, since most will not allow you to use an email address that is already registered in their system.

Trick #3 (not really a trick): Using filters and labels

One of the best things about gmail is the ability to easily create custom filters to organize your incoming email. You can filter your email in almost any way that you can think of. For example, let's say that you would like to redirect any email that has the word "AOL" directly to your trash folder (I hate AOL). You would just go to Settings->Filters->Create New Filter and fill out the form appropriately. On the next page, you just check the box that says "delete it," and your done.

A "label" is exactly that, a label or tag on your emails. You can set up a "label" based on your filter criteria. For example, you could apply the label "family" to any email that arrives from someone in your family. Labels can help you quickly find past emails, and they keep your inbox tidy.

An example: Slammin' that Spam

Time for a real world example of how to use all these gmail features. These instructions will help you set up a spam bustin' system.

1. Set up a "junk email" gmail account. Something like yourname.junk@gmail.com.
2. Set the new junk account to forward all your email to your real account. To do this, go to Settings -> Forwarding and Pop and fill out the box.
3. Set up a FILTER in your real gmail account. In the filter criteria, place your junk email address in the "FROM:" box so that the filter will be applied to any emails forwarded from your junk mail account.
   
4. Next, choose to "Apply a label" and select "New label..."
   
5. Name the label something like "Junk account" or "Bulk mail"
6. Click "Create filter."

Da-duh! You're done. Now, when you sign up for that next website, put in your JUNK email address, and use the "+" or "." trick (as discussed above) to tag the site. If that website sends you an email, you will still receive it in your real email because it will automatically forward. You will see who is responsible for the email by looking at the "+tag" part of the email. If you start getting too much spam in your real email address, all you have to do is either stop the forwarding, or create a filter in the junk mail account! Spaminora!