A question about text / spacing in MS Word/Wordpad

[gingentleman]

Sounds like you have more than issue to sort. First, boot your computer in safe mode and run your anti virus software again. After making sure you have no active viruses, boot normally. Download OpenOffice, which is a windows-compatible office suite, similar to Microsoft Office. Completely free/open source. It is synchronous with MS Office, so if you want to open a doc on a different computer, it will open with MS Office and visa-verso.

As for the spacing issue, it should be just as simple as tweaking the line-spacing parameters in WordPad.

Good luck...

 

[Pocketcub]

Open Office is known as libre office now, just a heads up.

 

[Yngbldhwk]

M10000: Once your system recovers from what looks like bluescreening, restart WordPad. open your doc and follow the steps below.

1. Select all the text w/your mouse.
2. With the text still selected, right-mouse-click and select the Paragraph option from the submenu.
3. Set the Line spacing to 1.00.
4. Uncheck the Add 10pt space after paragraphs option.
5. Click on the OK button.

This should effectively give you several single-spaced paragraphs.

 

[T-Rexx]

What is the free program I can use for documents? It is open source (or in open source)

Open Office is known as libre office now, just a heads up.

As Pocketcub has pointed out, the "free program" I suspect you are referring to is LibreOffice (formerly known as "Open Office"). LibreOffice is a suite similar to Microsoft Office, except that it is free and open-source. LibreOffice is compatible with MS Office file types and will format most MS Office files exactly as will MS Office. The LibreOffice suite includes a word processor, spreadsheet, graphics editor, slideshow creator, database and math formula writer. There is no note-taking software similar to OneNote, however.

LibreOffice is roughly about 98% as functional as MS Office. There are very few things that MS Office can do which LibreOffice cannot. There are a few things that LibreOffice can do which MS Office cannot. Microsoft has been pushing users to abandon MS Office in favor of its cloud alternative, Office 360, by making MS Office ever more expensive and constricted by licensing issues. This makes the free LibreOffice ever more attractive as an alternative.

If you are looking for only a word processor, however, another free and open-source alternative is Abiword. Abiword is roughly equivalent to MS Word in functionality. I understand that it does have some database and spreadsheet functionality as well, but I am not certain of the sophistication of this. My understanding is that it is mostly a word processor.

 

[looseliam]

ugh... I wish people wouldn't use postimage... but I digress

I don't know about wordpad, but in MS Office 2007+ the default style has an additional space after CR/LF. On the 'Home' ribbon, locate the 'Change Styles' button. Goto Style Set->Word 2003 then 'Set as default'.

 

[looseliam]

^ I was just bitching because I have it blocked at my proxy and don't see the images and it's a pain to unblock just for one view. I had to have associated it with with spam, ads, etc. as that's the only reason I'd block it.

But to the point, I prefer libreoffice, though there's been some contention on its pronunciation =]

Hell, I sent a word doc off to a supplier to become a distributor. It was their word doc. Not docx, just a doc. I filled it out and sent it back. It was all garbled to them. So much for compatibility.

 

[T-Rexx]

But to the point, I prefer libreoffice, though there's been some contention on its pronunciation =]

Hell, I sent a word doc off to a supplier to become a distributor. It was their word doc. Not docx, just a doc. I filled it out and sent it back. It was all garbled to them. So much for compatibility.

Compatibility with .doc files between LibreOffice and MS Word is very ,very good, but it is not perfect. For that matter, it is not perfect between different versions of MS Word, either.

MS drives me crazy this way. Even ascii text (which was standardized before Bill Gates was born) is formatted by Microsoft's text editors in nonstandard ways. That's why the formatting is often messed up when you try to copy and paste text from Notepad to a web site. It isn't the web site - it's Microsoft.

I understand that later versions of MS Word do support .odf (Open Document Format) files. I suspect Microsoft recognizes that, as its dominance over the business world begins to fade, it will have to become friendlier with file compatibility.

 

[looseliam]

Compatibility with .doc files between LibreOffice and MS Word is very ,very good, but it is not perfect. For that matter, it is not perfect between different versions of MS Word, either.

MS drives me crazy this way. Even ascii text (which was standardized before Bill Gates was born) is formatted by Microsoft's text editors in nonstandard ways. That's why the formatting is often messed up when you try to copy and paste text from Notepad to a web site. It isn't the web site - it's Microsoft.

I understand that later versions of MS Word do support .odf (Open Document Format) files. I suspect Microsoft recognizes that, as its dominance over the business world begins to fade, it will have to become friendlier with file compatibility.

Sorry, I was a bit vague: I edited their doc file in word, saved in word, and they still couldn't read it Their response: "we are unable to read the worksheet, it opens and looks like hexadecimal code." THey can't figure out how to read the text from a document, but know what hexadecimal looks like

I haven't tried office with odf. It it's in versions >2007, I doubt I'll ever see it!

 

[T-Rexx]

Sorry, I was a bit vague: I edited their doc file in word, saved in word, and they still couldn't read it

Well, that was my point. With Microsoft, there is no such thing as "standards." Even their own software can't read their own file formats!

I haven't tried office with odf. It it's in versions >2007, I doubt I'll ever see it!

Me, neither. The last version of Office I used was Office 2000 (I bought several copies for my office at $800 each!

). Since then, I have used OpenOffice/LibreOffice (and occasionally, Abiword) exclusively. I have yet to encounter a situation where the free software cannot handle something that Microsoft's products can do.

I don't understand why people waste so much money on Microsoft.

 

[looseliam]

^ people buy MS products? TIL

 

[T-Rexx]

I uninstalled 'Apache Open Source' as it was called because I didnt know what database they wanted from me . . .

Just thought you may be curious about what's going on here.

"OpenOffice" was once the standard free and open source office software suite, included with nearly every Linux distribution, and available for free download for nearly every OS platform. OpenOffice was initially created by Sun Microsystems, which owned the rights to the name but managed the software as a FOSS project. Many software engineers at Sun were paid to work on OO, but some of the work was also done by FOSS developers around the world. By all accounts, OpenOffice was one of the great software success stories of history, and a valuable Sun asset.

In 2010, Oracle, Inc. purchased Sun Microsystems. Oracle announced plans to commercialize OpenOffice and bring it proprietary. In protest, most of the developers working on OpenOffice left, and formed a group called The Document Foundation. They took the open source code they had been working on, and continued developing it as a fork they named "LibreOffice" (Oracle refused to allow The Document Foundation to use the "OpenOffice" name).

"LibreOffice" was supposed to be a temporary name. The people at The Document Foundation believed Oracle would soon join them, since taking OO proprietary seemed like madness to them (one of the biggest reasons people supported OO was because it was FOSS). Oracle steadfastly refused, however. The result was that everybody (and I do mean everybody) who had previously used and promoted OpenOffice switched to LibreOffice. The proprietary OO project at Oracle collapsed, utterly destroying a once-valuable property.

Its OpenOffice franchise now worthless, and lacking the resources necessary to continue such a large project alone, Oracle gave the OpenOffice name and code (apparently in spite) to the Apache Software Foundation (the same people who manage the Apache HTTP Server software). Apache has continued OO as a FOSS project, although it appears to have less robust development than LibreOffice. That's why your OO software was named "Apache Open Source" on your computer.

OpenOffice and LibreOffice share most of their code base, but are now forked into separate projects.