Main Meeting Highlights
June 1, 2012
The meeting was called to order at 7:33 p.m. by President Chuck Horner. Presiding at the Ticket Table, Harold Smith has raffle tickets, door prize tickets, and 3" x 5" cards to write questions for discussion/answers at the end of the Meeting. New and renewing members see Jan. The raffle prize this month is a 8" ViewSonic Digital Picture Frame.
Harold Smith would like to retire from the Ticket Table.
Chuck asked for a volunteer willing to take over for him. Lee Hunter volunteered. Thank you, Lee.
We still need folks willing to help out coordinating programs and with publicity. Neither asks that you do the job all by your self. See Chuck, Jan, or Bayle if you can help a bit in either of these areas.
SIG Announcements:
The Windows 7 SIG will meet on the second Saturday after the main meeting. Windows Home Server will be the topic of the June 9 meeting. The SIG will start at 1 p.m. at Bud Gallagher's house. Windows Bud noted that the Windows 8 Preview Edition was released yesterday and he does not like it.
The Spectacular Linux SIG meets at 2 p.m. on the last Saturday of the month, June 30. In May they looked at LinuxMint 13, Cinnamon interface. The plan is to look at the Mate interface, unless something more exciting is released in the interim.
As usual, the Hardware SIG will meet 8 p.m. at the Smith's the evening after the Main Meeting. Come to get help with your hardware or learn how to fix someone else's if your world is running smoothly. Be sure to bring all the documentation you can find. Even when it's a hardware problem, software is usually involved. Call the Smith's if you need directions. The phone number is in your Newsletter.
Chuck reports having seen rumors that RIM (Blackberry) may be on its way out. Jan has seen rumors of a new RIM operating system.
Presentations:
Member Diane George gave a demo of features she likes in Microsoft Word 2010. The Ribbon is arranged in order of features the typical user is likely to use. Highlighting the ribbon button results in a preview and a brief Help note. You can move the ribbon functions around using the Options button. Learning Essentials, on the Microsoft site, has many tutorials.
Right-click in a document and a menu of relevant choices appears.
Member Bayle Emlein demonstrated some of the features of the newly released WordPerfect X6. Reveal Codes still lead the feature list. Virtually every piece of modern software has context-sensitive right-click menus. The Search function will look for any codes. Keep It Together sets a soft block protect that is sensitive to formatting changes. Make It Fit lets the writer select the number of document pages by easily selecting from several formatting features. The Styles editor makes reformatting titles and headings a single-pass operation. The Typesetting option in the Format menu allows precise location of any character on the page/screen.
Sally Holt brought in a newspaper article reporting that Microsoft announced that anyone who buys a new computer with Windows 7 between June 2 and the end of the year can upgrade to Windows 8 for $14.95. Several people pointed out that the analogous upgrades to Windows 7 and Vista were free.
Member Jan Fagerholm presented the LibreOffice Writer word processing application. Many of the menus are very similar to Microsoft Word 2003 or earlier. Like the high price spreads, there are many templates for projects. Oh, did we mention that LibreOffice is libre, as in free and Writer has a much smaller footprint than Word. LibreOffice can be configured to load and save in Office formats (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). One can receive any version of Microsoft Office files, work on them, and send them back without needing the "correct" version of the paid programs or updating compatibility software.
Looking outside the office suites, Scribus is an open source desktop publishing program.
The meeting was adjourned at 9:58 p.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Bayle Emlein, Secretary
