You know, something I’ve advocated for some time, is the use of open source, free software.
Things like OpenOffice.org, and its Mac port, NeoOffice; both of which are free. Or at least, available for a small voluntary donation.
I’ve been using both applications — with various operating systems — for many years, quite happily. I’d also happily encourage any one who’s starting up as a pub quiz master to download and make use of, before spending money on things like Microsoft Office, or Apple’s iWork suite.
Something I’ve found useful with NeoOffice — and in Open Office — is that I can create and save what both call ‘templates’; pre-prepared forms, letters, what-have-you, that you can modify as and when needed.
Useful, for a pub quiz master, looking to save time. That enabled me to have a pre-prepared 60-question quiz template, shown in the third picture. All I had to add was the questions; something I usually kept in a spreadsheet.
On top of that, both OpenOffice and NeoOffice can save a given document — a poster or my business cards — as a .pdf, take to my local print-shop and have printed without having to worry that they’d look any different to how I’d designed them.
(Something I’ve noticed over the years is that a document will look different, when transferred between machines; even ones running the same combination of versions of, say, MS Office 2003 and Windoze XP. Saving something in the .pdf file format means that, while it can’t necessarily be edited, it can be printed as designed.)
Now I don’t know if that’s something that MS Office supports.
But, for me, that’s a damn helpful function!
•••••
I also know that I listened to tonight’s edition of Just a Minute, when I got home from work; as good as ever. Something that pleased me, though, was the fact that the late Clement Freud — one of the game’s greatest players — got a round of applause.
THAT made me smile!
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