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...mainly hoping to find a distro that is "more user friendly" than Slackware, and after two weeks I just gave up and installed Slackware 12.

I had my wife using Slackware 8.0 through 10. She is not a techie of any kind, but there is nothing unfriendly about Slackware once it is fully set up as a desktop machine. She eventually went over to using Macs because she decided she wanted to use EndNote to handle bibliographic referencing in her PhD thesis, since at the time there was nothing available that was nearly as good.

That's amazing. It has obviously been 17 years since you have seen any version of Word. Extensibility is one of the great features of Office.

I have written my own addons to Word to pull data from our central database and to seemlessly integrate with our network fax server. Our accounts department Word to link to their accounting software to facilitate invoicing. My wife uses a plugin to handle her citations at university. All this is done using external plugins for Word.

When they released Windows 95, Microsoft pushed ActiveX hoping to change the way we thought about applications. Their idea was that programs would become building blocks that would seemlessly fit inside each other rather than discrete - like the way you could embed an organisation chart in a Word or Excel document. The concept really failed to catch on, I think mainly due to the problem of not being able to send your documents to other people who did not have the same ActiveX controls.

It also caused problems when people upgrade software versions. A lot of the problems that people have tring to mix different versions of Office products can be traced back to embedded ActiveX controls.

Now it seems they have corrected the license statement to allow such sharing.

Kind of. Their terms of use state:

EndNote includes customization options that licensed individual and institutional customers can use to create new and modify existing EndNote style (.ens), filter (.enf), and connection (.enz) files for their personal use and to share with other licensed EndNote users for use only in conjunction with EndNote.

(emphasis mine). In other words, they claim that you can't use the files that you create using their software in third-party software, such as Zotero. This would be like saying you can't open an MS Word Document in OpenOffice.org Writer.

The cost is beside the point.

I am a long-time Linux (and much more recently OS X) user, and if I am presented with a piece of software that requires Windows to run it, I usually prefer to just do without.

Fortunately in my discipline (biotech) developers are beginning to realise there are alternatives - for instance, Geneious is a stupendously fine example. It's definitely not free, but it is available on multiple platforms, which is a big step away from where we were a couple of years ago.

Compare this with Endnote which is rapidly losing ground to Zotero because the developers refuse to cooperate with the *nix world.

I'm about to finish my fourth book for O'Reilly, Beautiful Teams: Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders (which should be out in stores by March).

As far as tools go, my coauthor, Jenny, and I wrote our first book using Microsoft Word, but could just as easily have been using OpenOffice, Pages or any other word processor. One thing that was enormously useful was EndNote for managing the bibliography. Our next two books were in O'Reilly's Head First series (PMP and C#), and we wrote them entirely in Adobe InDesign. (People think that there's a whole team of people designing and laying out Head First books -- it was just us, our editor, and an awesome but overworked graphic designer, Lou, who helped improve our layouts once we had them in reasonable shape.) InDesign isn't exactly the easiest tool for a book author, but it was sufficient. But it made me really appreciate word processors!

A few things that really became clear to me over the course of working on these books:

a) Pay attention to what you're delivering to your editor, and what they'll do with it. Publishers have their own set of templates and production stuff to get camera-ready copy together. Head First was a very interesting lesson in that, because Jenny and I actually produced a lot of camera-ready copy ourselves. But for most books, whatever you turn over to your publisher will get transmogrified into their own internal format.

b) The production editor people I've worked with and talked to (not just at O'Reilly, but at other publishers, too) have been extremely competent, and it's their job to take whatever it is you give them and make it work. It needs to be copyedited, typeset, and reviewed, and sent to a printer. I highly recommend getting to know them, and being as flexible and agreeable as possible (they generally won't ask you to compromise your vision for the book -- it's generally about technical stuff, like how to deal with footnotes, references, images, etc.)

c) You asked about version control. One of the best authors I've ever worked with, Karl Fogel -- he's a contributor to Beautiful Teams, and also just a great guy -- wrote a fantastic book called Producing Open Source Software, which you can buy from O'Reilly or download for free from the website. (Anyone who's interested in starting or contributing to an open source project absolutely needs to read that book. Disclosure: I was a technical reviewer for it.) In true open source fashion, Karl made his version control repository for the book available, and that's a good model to copy. Jenny and I didn't do anything quite so formalized; we just shared folders, and that was sufficient for us (even with hundreds and hundreds of image files for each Head First book).

d) This is the most important thing: make sure you have a clear idea of what it is you want to write! It's easy to get started on a project, only to have it trail off because you don't really have a whole book's worth of material. The more you can outline, the more research you do, and the more you prepare, the better the book will be.

Now, that's all assuming that you have a publisher lined up and a contract signed. If you don't, I highly recommend reading through the excellent Writing for O'Reilly section on their website. They walk you through all of the steps of proposing a book and the mechanics of actually working with a publisher -- and from everyone I've talked to, it's very similar

OpenOffice doesn't support Mac Users, so it's unlikely they'll support OpenOffice. NeoOffice is doing a pretty good job, though, and I recommend it to people who still want that "Office" feel. As for Microsoft office, most of the researchers I support use Microsoft Word for one reason: EndNote.

My Uni has a add on to Word called EndNote. I think it's about $30, so not free unfortunately, but it does a lot of stuff with regards to referencing and you can output references in any number of correct formats, including APA, which my uni also enforces.

OpenOffice would be great, except that in the academic world, Microsoft Office still holds a dominant position. Mainly, this is due to two facts. First, major citation programs that are critical to published scholarship, such as End Note, will not integrate with OpenOffice. Second, many major academic conferences require a PowerPoint presentation. Now, you can write all you want about how that sucks and how people should not support such stupid requirements, but they exist, and I as an academic professional must adhere to them.

So I am glad to see that M$ is patching these bugs. Anything that makes my essential tools safer is a Good Thing.

I second the Readerware suggestion.

It works for books, CDs, DVDs, pretty much anything you would want to catalogue that they sell at B&N or Amazon. It downloads information from those sites for your catalogue database, even images of the book covers. Readerware is shareware, but it runs on Linux, MacOS, Windows, and even Palm and iPod! Since you already have a bar-code scanner, you can download the software and try it, if you like it pay for a code, if not, you can uninstall and all it cost you is time.

I didn't have a barcode scanner, but Readerware happily gave me a free one with my codes for Readerware, ReaderwareAW and ReaderwareVW, the whole thing cost less than $100. There is even a client/server multi-user edition that costs a little more with either a 5 user license or an unlimited license. it saved me a ton of typing for bibliographies in papers, and I could easily export it to a format that made it simple to import into Endnote for citation

There are some others, but that one jumps out.

There are ways around it, but they are annoying.

Also, its end note engine stinks. It would be cool if OpenOffice supported add on programs like Endnote. Cite while you Write is only available for Office products and everything only on Windows or Mac. A friend of mine who is a cognitive science Phd. candidate would love to switch to Linux exclusively, but this alone stops that transition. For heavy research people, Endnote is a killer app.

You ask a school teacher why 40% of their budget is spent on microsoft products, and the only answer is: "That's what the industry uses, we'd be failing our kids if we taught them anything else". Hence our kids come out knowing MS Word, not word processing, MS Excel, not spreadsheets, and so on, and those kids will be buying MS software for life.

I'd like you to find a school teacher who says that 40% of their budget is spent on Microsoft products. If you do, I'll show you a liar. There's no way the entire software allocation makes up 40% of any school's budget. Indianapolis Public Schools estimates that their technology initiatives will require $17 million per year for the next four years. That's out of a half-billion dollar total budget. That's about 3.2%. All that information is available on their site. Most of that budget is spent on hardware and teaching, according to the last school board meeting I went to.

So, you're saying that it's impossible to learn word processing using Word? Buhhhh-loney. Word is a tool (and not just in the pejorative sense). The problem isn't that they're using Word, it's that they're not using it to properly teach the students the proper skills needed to use a general word processor. They're taking a hammer and showing kids how to use it as a screwdriver. Word is a great tool for word processing. It has too many features, but for the steal that schools get it for, it's great. Again, it's not the tool, it's the teaching. And, AFAIK, OOo doesn't integrate with EndNote, which many universities give their students for citation management.

When I took a "business computing" class in high school (1994 or 1995), we used WordPerfect for DOS. That thing was horrible. I had nightmares of white text with red highlights on blue screens. I cried every time the book called for setting tabs or creating a hanging indent.

Actually, I'm sure it breaks compatibility with some applications for reasons other than there being a firewall turned on. For example, I noticed that Endnote 8 is not compatible with it, but older versions are. This wasn't listed on the Microsoft sites linked to above as being a firewall issue.

Of course, it's possible that this could be a problem associated with 'bad coding' or whatever in Endnote rather than SP2.

You're talking about end notes; he's talking about EndNote, which is a completely different thing. EndNote is almost mandatory for anyone who writes any kind of document that requires a serious bibliography. It can import and store lists of references, reorganize them so that they're easy to find, and automatically format them into whatever exact format is required by the publisher. Every serious scientist I know has a huge library of EndNote references ready to put into their documents, and I assume that the same thing is true of scholars in other fields, lawyers, and just about anyone else who needs bibliographies.

You might want to take a look at the excellent bibliography management software EndNote. It has a lot of functionality that might serve as a foundation for what you want to accomplish.

If you just want to import citations, the Z39.50 search and retrieval protocol is the way to import from yor library catalog and many online databases. Indexdata has number of multiplatform tools that you can use, such as YAZ (a z39.50 client) and PHPYAZ. Three commercial packages import from Z39.50 sources nicely (Bookwhere, Procite and Endnote) both Procite and Endnot work well at managing your footnotes during workprocessing, taking care of numbering and layout (e.g. APA or Chicago Manual of Style, etc.).

If you want something under GPL and more oriented to managing web sites and other Internet resources, then you may want to try hypatia. You'll have to ask special for it, but it's available. Here are the parts I've seen so far:

• Web-based interface, both end users and maintainers.
• Fully multi-lingual, including both interface and content. (It is very easy to add another language to the interfaces. Right now English and Spanish are complete, Norwegian and Finnish are being translated.) Support for Unicode (Which means you're free to add interfaces in or ).
• Useable on many different platforms, including Linux, Unix, and Windows.
• Individual installations can exchange records, allowing federated content and service providers to work together seamlessly. (Haven't tried it yet.)
• Compatible with relevant standards, including MARC, Dublin Core, and the Networked Reference standard currently under development by NISO.
• Special features for digital collections, such as automatic URL checking.
• Authority control over names (e.g. People and Organizations).
• Uses perl/MySQL/javascript

After 14 years of programming with C++, I still do not consider myself an expert. After more than twenty years as a computing professional, I still only know a tiny part of what there is to know about computing.

Fallacy 2: Computers Allow People to Do things They Could Not Do Otherwise

It takes a lot more than a good word processor to create a good document. Creating a good document requires two things:
- Domain (in this case, typesetting) knowledge.
- my word processor was unable to provide that content

Fallacy 3: Computers Increase Productivity

What I pointed out here is that our programs have become feature-rich to the point where they completely overwhelm their users. Have a close look at the average word processor and multitude of feature that are in there.

Fallacy 4: Programs Help Their Users

So, does this mean that we all should do the same thing? Two (or many) wrongs make one right? I don't think so.

Fallacy 5: If It's Graphical, It's Easy

The GUI I get with Windows does not make me a sysadmin ... and the GUI does not make being a sysadmin intrinsically easier.

I'm way faster producing text draft with vi than with Word or Frame. As a text input and editing program, it is far less efficient than something like vi or emacs.

Fallacy 6: Computers are Getting Faster

I never said that everything was slower today.

Fallacy 7: Programs are Getting Better

I think whether programs are getting better depends largely on the perspective of a particular person.

Programs are getting more and more complex to use, harder to install, harder to uninstall, harder to keep up-to-date, are prone to virus infection, force me to keep buying bigger hardware all the time, often make it impossible to transfer customization to another computer running the same program, etc, etc

Fallacy 8: Programmers are Getting Better

My thesis is that CS graduates are, on average, less qualified today than they used to be, especially when it comes to lower abstraction levels, such as hardware principles or assembly language, and theoretical computing, such as compiler construction or complexity analysis.

We routinely ask programmers (especially graduates) to do things they are in no way qualified to do.

KWord is easily up to the task of generating nice letters, letterheads, memos, faxes and papers, but lacks hyphenation, mail merge (or any database integration) and endnotes/footnotes. Similar stories for the other applications. But, with all due respect to the diligent work of the filter developers, the biggest obstacle to KOffice right now is the filters for MS Office documents.

what's the use of filters for opening Word file formats if the program doesnt support the features? Fine, it's ok if KOffice doesnt have Auto-Hyphen Underlining. But lacking endnotes/footnotes? mail merge is gone? These are SERIOUS problems. It automatically means KOffice is totally useless for any professional academic or business use. What will happen if I try to open my Physics Thesis or my Business Plan word file in KOffice - will it barf when it gets to eth footnotes? mangle it beyond compare?

Features DO MATTER. It's a very sour-grapes attitude to say "sure our open source Office lacks some features, but users dont use them anyway". If all you want out of an Office suite is to type some letters, then you don't need Office, you just need Microsoft Works! but if you want to use an Office suite for true business or academic or professional uses, you need much more features than the average letter writer.

frankly, there's a REASON that Office became the behemoth it is, and that is solely due to features, not monopoly. Remember Wordperfect used to OWN the Office space, and Lotus has a really nice office suite as well. In fact I myself used to be a SAM file diehard, until one day I just realised that the things I wanted, Lotus was dragging its feet on, and Word already had (example - integrated equation editor. advanced font and layout abilities. sectioning and numbering. Automatic tables and figures indexes. list goes on). Other things like support for third party tools like EndNote and MathType. KOffice is still behind even what Lotus and Wordperfect used to have, though I do agree it has a very nice graphic UI. And yet we still accuse the Windows people of liking style over substance?

If you want to do professional business or academic work, there are only two options. TeX or Microsoft Office. Right now, KOffice is still in Microsoft-Works league. Features DO matter and we need them on teh desktop office suite (not the browser :P)