By Fred Langa There are a surprising number of excellent office software suites available, and some of the best don’t cost a dime. MS Office remains the king of office suites, but if you can’t or don’t want to use it, numerous free and commercial substitutes stand ready to serve.

Linux’s KOffice coming soon for Windows and Mac

Reader Louis St. Germain is weaning himself from Microsoft Office and wonders about an office suite from a different vendor:

• “A friend just told me of KOffice as an alternative to Microsoft Office. It’s free (or purportedly so), but it appears to be a beta. Do you have any information you could share?”
  

KOffice (product site) is indeed free. It’s an open-source office suite that’s very popular on Linux systems. Like most office suites, KOffice contains a word processor, spreadsheet application, and other tools.



You’re correct in stating that finished KOffice versions for Windows and Mac OS X aren’t ready yet. The Windows version should be out in early 2010 and the one for the Mac sometime thereafter. Because the Windows version is beta — “experimental,” in open-source-speak — I suggest you avoid it for now. There are better, proven Office alternatives.

For example, the OpenOffice.org suite (home site) has been around in various forms for more than 20 years. Its recent roots trace back to a full-blown commercial office suite called StarOffice. Sun Microsystems bought StarOffice in 1999 and released it after a while as freeware.

A bit later, Sun opened the source code and allowed outside developers to contribute to the software. It was renamed “OpenOffice,” but that name turned out to be trademarked by another company. As a result, both the open-source office suite and the organization that controls it are now officially known as “OpenOffice.org.”

Today, OpenOffice.org is the Big Dog in alternatives to MS Office; the current version 3.x has been downloaded over 100 million times. The software runs on Windows and all other major OSes. OpenOffice.org supports the international standard OpenDocument file format and also handles Microsoft Office file formats.

In fact, just about anything you can do in MS Office you can also do in OpenOffice.org. The suite is available in 110 languages and is free for any purpose, including commercial use. Anyone who has used Office-type apps will become acclimated to the OpenOffice.org interface quickly. (See Figure 1.) OpenOffice.org is the office suite I use when I’m not using MS Office.


Figure 1. A simple, familiar layout makes it easy to get up to speed with OpenOffice.org’s applications (the Writer word processor is shown here).

If you’re office-suite shopping, you probably also should take a look at online office apps that run in your browser. Perhaps the best-known of these is Google Docs (home site), a free Web-based word processor and spreadsheet, presentation, and form application.

Many of the service’s menu items and keystroke combinations are similar to those in MS Office, and Google Docs can read and write most common MS Office file formats. You can store your Google Docs files online or on your hard drive.

Those two contenders — OpenOffice.org and Google Docs — are the most-popular free alternatives to MS Office, but even a quick Web search will turn up many other free and commercial options. To help sort through them, here’s a great place to start: WS contributing editor Scott Spanbauer’s June 18, 2009, Top Story looks at several free Office alternatives.

But note: MS Office 2010 — now in public beta — will feature free online (browser-based) versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

So in addition to the many office-suite choices you currently have, you’re about to get more. It’s a good time to be shopping for office software!

Problems purchasing hardware for home-built PC

Bob Berles wants to build a new Windows PC, but vendors don’t seem to be cooperating:

• “I want to build a Windows PC, but I can’t find what I want anyplace. I want to purchase the MSI 785GM-E65 motherboard with AMD 785G chipset and the Athlon II X2 235e processor. For the mobo, all I get is, ‘Sorry! This item is currently out of stock.’ I can’t even find the 235e anywhere. Help!”
  

Not to worry, Bob. You’ve just hit the “bust” part of a normal — but annoying — “boom and bust” cycle.

You see, most of the guts of PCs are commodity items, meaning they’re produced in enormous quantities and are, to some degree, interchangeable. There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part, desktop RAM, motherboards, hard drives, and other components are electronic commodity items produced in Asia.

As with all commodities, the pricing and availability of these items follow boom-and-bust cycles.

It goes something like this: A factory churns out a million widgets, flooding the marketplace. Vendors suddenly have warehouses bulging with unsold widgets, so they drop the price to stir up interest. As the price drops, consumers respond and snap up the bargain-priced widgets.

But if the widgets sell too well, the supply starts to become exhausted. Retailers then take advantage of the high demand by jacking up the price. They also place orders for more widgets, and the factory gears up for another run.

Until the new shipments arrive, the widgets may sell out completely. You end up with consumers ready to purchase, but with no widgets on the shelves.

That’s what happened in your case, Bob. As I write this, the products you mentioned are once again available, meaning that some container ship docked somewhere and disgorged a literal boatload of motherboards and CPUs — enough to refill the retail pipeline, at least for a while.

Eventually, older and oddball products go off sale and don’t come back, but mainstream desktop motherboards, CPUs, RAM, hard drives, and other PC innards will almost always recover from shortages. Just wait a bit and try your purchase later!

Has flash drive encryption been cracked?

Donald Holliday sounds a warning about “secure” flash drives:

• “I thought you might find this H Security article interesting. It turns out, NIST-certified hardware encryption for flash drives has been cracked by a clever but fairly simple approach.”
  

Thanks, Donald. In this case, the actual encryption wasn’t cracked. The problem was the way it was implemented in “high-security” encrypted flash drives from SanDisk, Kingston, and Verbatim. All three companies use software that runs in the open on the host PC to validate their decryption passwords.

In theory, hackers could gain access to the encrypted data in two steps. First, they’d have to install malware on the host PC to “sniff” the plain-text password as it was entered there. Then, they’d have to steal or otherwise gain physical access to the flash drive to use the password to examine or copy its contents.

It’s not a high-risk scenario; in any case, all the affected vendors are busy rewriting their software. If you use an encrypted flash drive from SanDisk, Kingston, or Verbatim, visit the vendor’s site to download the improved software when it becomes available.

This still serves as an important object lesson: any security device, process, or technology thought up by clever humans can eventually be defeated by other clever humans. Be careful out there!

Looking for ways to enlarge a C: partition

Lyle Fettig is looking for an easy way to make his C: partition bigger without having to take everything down to the bare metal and start over:

• “My computer (Win XP Professional) is running out of room on the C: drive. I didn’t allow enough room on C: when I first partitioned it. I have tons of room on my D: and E: drives and a small amount of unallocated space.
  
  “What’s the easiest and safest way to repartition or expand C:?”
  

What you want is software to “resize” partitions; that’s the usual term for this process. A good partition resizer will let you take space from partitions that are larger than necessary and reallocate that space to partitions that need more. No reformatting is required.

Although it’s always wise to make a backup before doing any heavy-duty maintenance work on your PC, most resizers work reliably.

My personal favorite resizing tool is Terabyte Unlimited’s BootItNG, which is free to try and $35 to purchase (vendor’s site). BootItNG is a multipurpose tool that lets you create, delete, grow, or shrink partitions. You can also manage a PC’s boot process and perform image backups.

The program is tiny enough to fit on a single floppy, but squeezing that much complexity into so tiny a space creates a problem: the software’s interface is primitive, so the utility can be hard to use. BootItNG is really aimed at intermediate and expert PC users.

The Acronis Disk Director Suite (vendor’s site) is intended for a more-general audience. The program operates like a “black box” that shields users from the programmatic intricacies of partition management.

The down side is that Disk Director Suite is large and its black-box approach may drive more-advanced users nuts. (I confess: I fall into the latter camp.) The program costs $50, although a free demo version is available.

Other free partition-management tools include resizing among their features. TheFreeCountry.com’s Partition Editors page contains a large and useful list.

Expert or novice, commercial or free, there’s bound to be a partition resizer that will suit your needs to a T!

Have more info on this subject? Post your tip in the WS Columns forum.

Fred Langa is editor-at-large of the Windows Secrets Newsletter. He was formerly editor of Byte Magazine (1987–91), editorial director of CMP Media (1991–97), and editor of the LangaList e-mail newsletter from its origin in 1997 until its merger with Windows Secrets in November 2006.

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