----- From: Bob : I know OO is supposed to be completely compatible with MS Office but : have you ever heard of a guy named Murphy? It is still worth a try given it is free! OK, not everything that is free is automatically worth using JUST because it is free but .. I bought three commercial packages for backing up DVD's in the days when such software was legal to buy here. All were large installations (tens of Mb) with flashy interfaces and inbuilt wizards, All were respectable companies, all were bug ridden and had variously poor algorithms resulting in pixelated or banded compressed output and they took all night to do the job. In toto, a waste of money and time, irrespective of the fact that everyone else was using the same thing and they came highly recommended. DVDshrink was a 256kb download, free and the results beat the pants off the others, produced clean looking copies of the originals, eliminated idiotic menus and didn't insist on putting additional frames on the final DVD's advertising themselves. I've used some very expensive audio programs in the past, but since using Audacity (free) I've completely forgotten the names of these Pro editing packages! Some of the college students put me onto this when I discovered they were reluctant to use the college facilities preferring to handle the work at home on slower machines.. now I can understand why! There really is some fantastic freeware out there (irfanview ;) available to anyone who's prepared to simply download it and give it a try. k
