Micro$oft jacks up the price of Office 2011 and how to install a free alternative.

Updates from Around the Web

Microsoft just bumped the price for Office 2011 for Mac up $20.00. No improvements, but you shell out another $20.

Editorial statement: Dude, find out if your employer has the Microsoft Home User Program as an employee benefit. For $9.95, I downloaded and installed Office 2011. Not some sleazy pirate download, but direct from the Redmond mothership.

If you want to contribute $20 toward independent software development, go to Neooffice.org. After donating to the development of NeoOffice, you can download version 3.3. At heart, it is OpenOffice.org; but OpenOffice.org optimized for OS X. They’ve taken out the Java code used in the past and replaced it with native Cocoa code.

I notice that the ArsTechnica.com Web site suggests LibreOffice.org as a free alternative to Office 2011 for Mac and Office 2013 for Windows. A word of caution: LibreOffice uses Java, so check to make sure you use the latest version of Java. The one patched against unwanted intruders.

I went on Macupdate.com to find this latest Java update, pushed out to deal with Chinese hacker attacks.

If you use the Oracle version of Java, check your Java control panel. You will find it at the bottom of the Preference Panes in the Other category. Here’s mine, as an example.

Once You’ve Got Java up to date, on to LibreOffice

You downloaded LibreOffice 4 and went to install it. Then you saw this:

To temporarily get around this. control-click or right-click on the LibreOffice app in your /Applications folder.

You see the Open selection at the top of the pop-up menu. Click on that and you should get this:

Click on “Open” lets you run LibreOffice on your Mac. You only need to do this once.

In other news….

Could Apple be readying a Retina MacBook Air?

tom Briant

Editor, MacValley Blog