'From a purely personal point of view I've always found Excel to be
pretty powerful and a more flexible application than Access. I've also
had success with using OpenOffice applications, so I suppose it
depends what your institution can offer you in the way of support.'
OpenOffice has now been rebranded by Oracle which bought Sun. Those
of us who prefer proper, untainted OpenSource now use LibreOffice,
which is developed out of OpenOffice, but has been improved, and the
code cleaned up and made more concise (compare that with M$ crapware -
layers of shit on shit).
My wife bought an HP OfficeJet 7000 (on sale at a certain office
retailer). It has network capabilities so I used a UTP cable to set
it up to a power network system. As my wife was using her Windoze PC
at the time, I worked on the connection from my Linux notebooks (three
different Linux distributions). The systems found the networked
printer with no problem, downloaded the appropriate HPLIP drivers,
opened the specific port, printed a test page, and then a text file,
with no problems - five minutes. When the Windoze PC became
available, I spent an hour and a half in first installing the drivers
from CD, then trying to configure the firewalls (Windoze and a certain
anti-virus app) to allow access through the port to the network, with
no success because there are two proprietary firewalls to reconfigure.
In the end, I gave up and installed it using a USB cable, renouncing
the network capability. Linux is now streets ahead of Windoze - as
are many OpenSource apps because they are tightly coded, not piling
crap upon crap to form poor bloatware.
DP
|