College Computing 101: The word is "free"

Way back when I was at UC Santa Cruz in the dark days known as the 1980s, maybe one in a hundred kids came to campus with their very own personal computer -- usually an Apple II. The rest of us? We used (shudder!) typewriters.

I even had a manual typewriter at one point. Clickety-clack ... mistake ... open up the Liquid Paper (thanks, Monkee Mike Nesmith's mother, inventor of the correction fluid), paint it on, blow on it, then start again.

It could get ugly. Pushed to the brink by an overzealous teaching assistant, I did the only thing I
could do. I opened up a Unix computing account at the university, sat myself in front of one of dozens of "dumb" terminals around campus (they looked like military surplus even then) and learned how commands like ls, cp, nroff and lpr turned adolescent prose into ... laser-printed adolescent prose at 5 cents per page, to be picked up at the campus' remote, tree-shrouded computer center.

Enough about me and my 20-year-old problems. Now every student arrives at college equipped with their very own PC. And why not? Take two, as they say, they're cheap. But the software is not. For that you can thank Microsoft, maker of the industry-standard Word program.

Are you beginning college this fall? Let me put between $120 and $400 right back into your -- or your parents' -- pocket. Now you're listening. Good, because this will be on the test.

Once you've got your computer plugged in, your printer hooked up, the thing you're going to do most -- besides checking the Facebook pages of everybody you meet -- is writing. Essays, term papers, take-home exams, maybe even short stories -- and you need word-processing software to do it.

You can buy the PC version of Microsoft Word for $109.99. That amount jumps to $199.99 for the Macintosh (all prices from Amazon). But Word is usually bundled with the entire Microsoft Office "suite" of programs -- including the Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint presentation software, plus a bunch of other stuff you probably don't need -- for between $121.99 and $399.99.

Stop! Save your money for pizza and beer. (I mean "textbooks.") You can get all the functionality you need in a word processing program and not spend a dime.

You can create Word-compatible documents without Microsoft Word. It's the magic of free software -- a movement that has been gaining steam for years and which is now delivering applications that anyone can download, try out and use forever. Did I forget to say "free"?

The two free programs at the top of my list for word processing are AbiWord and OpenOffice Writer. Both are available in versions that run on Windows PCs, Macs and even the free Linux operating system.

AbiWord
Abiword is small, loads incredibly fast and saves in a variety of formats -- most importantly Microsoft Word's DOC format. For most college assignments -- essays, term papers, take-home exams -- AbiWord is all you need. You can automatically number your pages, insert images and tables, and check your spelling (trust me -- spell-check is your real best friend, not that guy with the keg down the hall).

And if your PC is, shall we say, "vintage," meaning more than a few years old, AbiWord will make at least some of that age peel away. Even if you need something stronger, keep Abi in your arsenal. I use it all the time at the Daily News. Formatting is easy, the printouts look great. It's like a can-opener for files. You will need it.

AbiWord can be downloaded at the program's Web site.

OpenOffice Writer
Part of the full-featured (yet fully free) OpenOffice suite, Writer is for those who absolutely must have an advanced word processor. Many a master's thesis and more than a few huge books have been written with OpenOffice Writer. OpenOffice is installed on every PC in the Daily News newsroom. It's industrial-strength freeware.

Like MS Word (and, sadly, unlike AbiWord), OpenOffice Writer uses "typographical" quote marks -- the ones that curl one way or the other and which are important to anal-retentive copy-editor types like myself -- and perhaps your own detail-obsessed teaching assistant. Just about anything Word can do, OpenOffice Writer can do, too.

In fact the entire OpenOffice suite is designed from the ground up to make Microsoft Office unnecessary. Besides Writer, OpenOffice includes programs that can create spreadsheets, PowerPoint-style presentations, databases, graphics and complex mathematical equations.

The suite runs on Windows and Linux computers, and while there is a working version for the Mac, a much better OpenOffice, called Aqua, is currently in development. And for those Apple users who can't wait, a "fork" of the project that runs natively on the Mac, called NeoOffice, can be downloaded right now -- also for free. Mac users, I suggest trying all three: AbiWord, OpenOffice for Mac and NeoOffice.

Next week's College Computing class:

Steven Rosenberg writes about technology at Click. For answers to your technology questions, send him an e-mail. If he knows the answer, he'll write about it here. If not, he'll find someone smarter who does.

Screen grab of AbiWord

Screen grab of OpenOffice