I use the Open Office suite at work: mainly the Word and PowerPoint clones, and, on occasion, the Excel clone. The software rather religiously copies the functionality (even the annoying parts) of the Microsoft Office suite, which I've also used in the past. The nice thing about OO is it's free and open source. It rusn on multiple paltforms. It opens from and saves files to all the usual file formats, and saves to PDF as a bonus. (A disclaimer is that I work for the company which currently owns the software and pays for its development.) I know that the good doctor uses it, too.

You remind me of a Disney comic from my youth where the eternally destitute Donald Duck comes across a lamp, produces a genie, and keeps asking for clams and coconuts and lettuce, actually desiring cash of course, but getting exactly what he has requested and heating up to where he will surely apoplectically explode. But, dear and most lovely Blade, nothing you might spring on me and definitely no excess of wordplay - something so dear to my heart - would cause me to give any request from you anything less than my immediate and full attention. And in fact I physically cannot. Are you all aware that I have a several small electrodes attached to my pericardium, adrenal medulla and scrotum, remotely controlled over a scalable mesh network connection to a FreeBSD server in the basement of home, humming away quietly and watching with the overly rapt attention of an electronic brain for questions posted to this forum, resulting in, respectively, an immediate doubling of my heart rate, an overproduction of epinephrine, and a sweet and provocative increase in my already high sexual tension, risking my health and well-being until your questions have been answered? And anyway, you have brought me out of my funk this morning, induced by a frantic search through all my fetish wear for something Folsom street appropriate, something enticing yet something which won't break the hearts of all the aging leather men when their hearts, skipping beats, sink upon learning that my 5% gayness doesn't extend to the popping of the cherry of my yes still virgin butt.

But as it turns out, I am intimately familiar with the Open Office. I use it all the time because it works great, it's very compatible with the ubiquitous Microsoft Office Suite and, as you say, it is absolutely free. I actually use Neo Office - the Mac native version of the software - but it's the same underneath (as are each of us you know). A friend of mine who works at Sun tells me that he toils there under an edict requiring all employees to use it. It's a bit slower at start up than Microsoft Word but I've never run into any other problems. Note that if you are going to email your resumes to people you will want to use the save as feature to save them in Word format since that is still more common - or as PDF files if your computer can do that.

Bonne chance mon ami,

erling (phd)