[geeks] Office OS X

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 07:03:41PM -0800, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> --- Kurt Huhn <kurt at k-huhn.com> wrote:
> > Joshua D Boyd <jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu> wrote:
> > > Myself, I use emacs instead of Word, siag or gnumeric instead of
> > > Excel (though more often I just scratch out small scheme or elisp
> > > files instead of using either), and probably the Gimp or
> > > Illustrator instead of PowerPoint.  The only thing I don't have a
> > > great substitute is Access.  Who needs any of the normal office
> > > suites?
> 
> Joshua, you don't use squeak in place of powerpoint - supposedly Alan
> Kay uses it for his presentations... (Per John Dvorak)

I've heard that Kay does that, but I don't care for animation and such
in presentations for the most part (unless there is a good reason it
would be usefull, that is, which so far it has never been for me), and I
do like the clarity of well prepared overheads, and would love to use
slides.  One of these days, I'm going to investigate getting slides
made.  I found a film printer I can use on campus, and as long as I live
locally, I could probably continue using it.  I want to go take a test
run at using it to print to slide film.

Kay said something about writing up some documents on using Squeak for
presentations, but he seems to be spending all his time on Croquet. 
 
> Also, why not use MySQL in place of Access? My company uses Access
> every day, and there is little in Access that MySQL can't do...

Basically, until recently, the places a database would have been most
helpfull (ie, the shell I spend a lot of time logged into) had no
database and that was beyond my control.  Now JP has granted me an
account with MySQL access, but I haven't had time to play with it.  I
had previosly been looking at SQL Lite a little, but hadn't had time to
be serious.  After I graduate I'll look into it more.  Ideally, I'd have
data collected and stored there, then batch downloaded nightly to a home
database server.

> OT: One of the neatest little boxes I've seen lately is the HP
> 100/200LX - great little DB built-in, just draw a form and go! No
> tables todefine, it all Just Works (tm).

Wow.  Sounds cool.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd