10 Amazing Tricks for Open Office

open-officeOpen Office has carved a niche in the office suite market as the most viable alternative for Microsoft Office. It's popularity is contributed to the fact that it is a freeware and it supports standard OpenDocument Format as well as Microsoft Office formats. With a Microsoft Office like interface and all essential features, the Open Office suite has been designed to meet the needs of most office environments. It's no wonder that small and mid-sized entrepreneurs running on budget are increasingly switching to this open source office suite. Open Office 3.0 version was a major upgrade and now we have the 3.1 version with enhanced features and bug fixes.  Features introduced in the Office Suite includes a vector-based drawing environment called Draw, a presentation program called Impress, a spreadsheet program called Calc, and several others. With so much on offer, you still have a lot to explore in Open Office. To enhance your experience with the Office Suite we offer you 10 amazing tricks for Open Office. Full article (1426 words) »

Feature: Will Sun Rise with Oracle?

oracle_logoUnlike IBM's failed attempt to acquire Sun Microsystems, the $7.4 billion tendered by Oracle to buy the Santa Clara-based enterprises solutions firm makes good sense for all three companies. It is also gives an honourable exit and hope of a new dawn for a setting Sun, in danger of being gobbled up and swallowed. Oracle, for one, won't do that. For this company, Sun's hardware solutions are a missing link in the enterprise solutions story. The competitor buying a brand to kill it may be lurking in there, though.

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11 Prime Features of openSUSE 11.1 - A Comprehensive Review

I hope you all remember our detailed reviews on Fedora 10, Windows 7 and Ubuntu 8.10. But we are not finished yet. Open Suse is coming out with their new version of 11.1 and we are at it. openSUSE 11.1 beta 4 is just released, while the official launch of the final version is on 18 December, 2008. We took a detailed look into openSUSE 11.1 beta 4 and here are the gems we found.

Quick Overview

Some of the key new features include an improved KDE desktop experience, better synchronization with the iPod with an updated Banshee Media Player, and many other improvement and refinements in the openSUSE desktop. Also included are software updates including GNOME 2.24, KDE 4.1.3, OpenOffice.org 3.0, and Firefox 3.0.3 - confirms the developers. There is more after the break and nice pictures too.

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iPhone: How To Recover From 1.1.1 Firmwire Upgrade in 4 Steps

iPhone Elite hackers have finally posted ways to un-brick your iPhone (make it usable again) after it has been rendered useless by Apple's iPhone firmwire upgrade 1.1.1. Any iPhone which was modified (software) to unlock the SIM card to use it without AT&T subscription or switch to a different provider were affected by the upgrade. Now you can make your iPhone usable again in four simple idiot-proof steps.

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Sun Joins The Dark Lord: Brilliant Strategic Move or Totally Lost?

Anakin Skywalker->Darth Vader

As you all probably know by now Sun decided to sell Windows 2003 servers (gasp, sputter… Scott McNealy would surely turn in his grave on hearing this news; wait a minute, he is still the Chairman of Sun) on its hardware. The key question on everyone's mind is has Sun finally found a direction as Microsoft's partner or has Sun joined the dark side as some would like to say or has Sun finally lost its marbles or whether it is really a strategically brilliant move? Significantly Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, is eerily silent on his blog about this initiative and continues to promote OpenOffice as an alternative to Microsoft Office.
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How To Read / Write Excel Spreadsheet From Java

Overview

There are two good choices for reading & writing Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet files from Java, in a platform independent way, - jexcelapi and Jakarta POI (HSSF). Both of them provide nice interface to access Excel data structure and even generate new spreadsheet. I have done extensive tests with both of them for a high-profile project for a Fortune 500 company. Previously also I had successfully used HSSF for another high profile client. In the paragraphs below I present my conclusions and sample code for reading Excel spreadsheet from Java using both the libraries.
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Microsoft PowerPoint Suffers From Memory Corruption Security Vulnerability

Naveed has discovered a vulnerability in Microsoft PowerPoint, which potentially can be exploited to compromise any user's system. The vulnerability has been confirmed on Windows XP SP2 with a fully patched PowerPoint 2003. Other versions may also be affected.

Full article (133 words) »

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