Eddie and Ann have been enjoying the garden, and strolls on the beach at La Cala this last couple of days. We went to Mijas pueblo for lunch and a walk around yesterday. Today, I celebrated the Annunciation a day late at St Andrew's, and did some preparatory work for the Good Friday Vigil at the Cross. When it came to prepare the St John Passion dialogue, I realised I didn't have a suitable text anywhere in my archive, so I had to download one and then edit it into an A5 leaflet format. Working with MS Office 2003 on the Chaplain's laptop, using first Publisher and then Word was infuriatingly frustrating, as neither program would let me control the pre-set format, and text wouldn't display as I wanted it. I wasted a couple of hours on this and then give up and went home feeling most annoyed.
After lunch, I had another go with the same text I'd downloaded, and in half an hour had a print ready document, using the latest version of Libre Office. Each new edition marks an improvement on the previous one. It gives me all the control I need where I need it, and these days loads up and runs almost as quickly as MS Office, a credit to the work of hundreds of volunteers who had worked on code revision over the past couple of years. I've used Libre Office and Open Office before it, with loyalty, although never exclusively, as there have been times when I needed to use MS Publisher for special booklet production. I keep a copy on one of my several machines. All the rest have Libre Office. Why would I bother to buy a Microsoft product which insists it knows better than I do what I want and how I should do it. However inefficient and quirky my productivity habits are, I remain the best judge of what gets the job happily done. And in almost all cases these days that means Libre Office. Well done you guys!
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