document help

[JDH2]

Quick background, My husband is a General Contractor, he is easily frustrated with technology and computers in general. His mom lives with us (ugh), she is 76 and not really good with computers and/or changes but she does the majority of the typing for him. When she moved in and took the typing over from his ex-wife (haha) she started on Word Perfect. I know that Word Perfect is way outdated. I have to convert any files to be emailed to pdf for the other person to open them. I also have the Microsoft Works Word Processor, I think.
I had some issues with her asking her to stop making the whole document in bold but finally got that resolved. She also does them in all caps which to me it makes it harder to read but she says that it makes it easier. I have always thought the the heading with the company name should be somewhat bigger than the rest of the document.( I usually do the heading at 16 then drop the rest to 14) My biggest issue with word perfect is that the lining up just does not look straight no matter what. He likes them done a certain way but some changes may not hurt his feelings.

company name

date
to
re

1. $$$$
2. ect

total

That is the basic of what we do. Is there program that would be easy to transition her to and to make the lining up easier. Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[Garden_girl]

Have you tried Open Office.org? They have a word processing program based on Microsoft Word.

Open Office

I use Microsoft Office at home and at work, and M/Word is similar to Corel's WordPerfect. I also have WordPerfect, & I don't think it's as user friendly as the Microsoft programs, so this should be a piece of cake for your MIL to use.

The big drawback with Open Office is that you get a suite of programs (that are basic with Microsoft Office) when you download it. There is Writer (Word), a spreadsheet program similar to Excel, a slide presentation program like PowerPoint, a database program (Access) and a Draw program like Paint or Microsoft Draw. You can export documents as PDF's.

The good news is that is free and if you don't like the program(s), you can uninstall it. The bad news is that is around 400 mb and if you're on dial-up, I wouldn't download it, it would take forever. They also have add-ins for the programs and support, in the way of forums on their website.

 

[sendchocolate]

I second Open Office. I own nothing Micro$oft except one computer does have Windows. Instead of MS Office, we use Open Office. Works well. Yay, for Open Source!

 

[JDH2]

Cool. I have it on one computer but have not played with it yet. I would love to go Mac but I would have to replace 2 pcs and teach both of them.
On a heading, do you think that it should be larger than the body?

 

[janices]

Open Office has various plug-ins for more advanced function also. I use it for importing pdfs and editing.

 

[Garden_girl]

On a heading, do you think that it should be larger than the body?

If you look at Styles and Formatting in your program, yup, the headings are larger and bold.

 

[CMDRTED]

Company Names in the Heading as a rule are Larger than the rest of the heading. I use MS Office as that's what the federal Goverment uses. Gov employees get MS WOrd, or Excell, or the rest for $12.00 for home use (just in case you might accidently to free (i.e.; unpaid work ar home). So that's what I use. Didn't know they still sell word perfect anymore.

 

[Leonard and his bud Snuffles]

The big drawback with Open Office is that you get a suite of programs (that are basic with Microsoft Office) when you download it. There is Writer (Word), a spreadsheet program similar to Excel, a slide presentation program like PowerPoint, a database program (Access) and a Draw program like Paint or Microsoft Draw. You can export documents as PDF's.

It has been a while, but I do not think you have to install everything. All I got is Calc on this machine, since Word came with MS Works Suite that came with the machine.

 

[Garden_girl]

:bear: I have to wash a filthy little puppy right now, Leonard, but I installed it in 2009 on our club's computer. You have to download the whole package (440 mb) but I *think* you may be able to do a custom install with it, choosing which programs you want. The club wanted the whole package, though. It used to be that you could download the programs separately, after all, how many people need a database program? I should think that you can also uninstall it program by program, but I never looked at the control panel to see how it was set up after I installed it.

 

[rhoward]

Open Office will work fine and it's free. I use MS applications because my brother works for Microsoft.

 

[JDH2]

Thanks for the replies. I will try and check it out and hope for a smooth transition. lol