1/4/2006
You can take it with you: Portable office suite on a USB drive
Update: The PortableApps.com site appears to be under stress from its slashdot appearance. However, you can still get the Portable OpenOffice package from its Sourceforge site. If you like it, don't forget to visit the PortableApps.com home page and hit the "Make a Donation" button. Useful open-source software should be rewarded!
Portable USB (i.e., "thumb") drives make it convenient to carry your data with you from computer to computer, but what happens when the nearest computer doesn't have the application you need to open your documents?
This is why I love the open-source community: Portableapps.com has just released Portable OpenOffice.org 2.01 — a complete office suite you can run from a USB drive for complete access to both your files and your office apps — anywhere you go.
From the PortableApps.com site:
Portable OpenOffice.org is a full-featured office suite that's compatible with Microsoft Office, Word Perfect, Lotus and other office applications. It's easy-to-use and feature-rich, performing nearly all of the functions you'd expect in an office suite, but at no cost. Learn more about OpenOffice.org…
This is exactly the kind of innovation developers can make when they don't have to worry about selling as many licenses of their work as possible: Suddenly, they're free to create applications that can be used whenever and however one wants to use them. I don't imagine we'll see a portable Microsoft Office suite any time soon.
The company also offers Portable Gaim (for IM anywhere) and Portable Firefox (for take-your-settings/bookmarks/extensions-with-you-anywhere browsing convenience).
11 Responses to “You can take it with you: Portable office suite on a USB drive”
So what do you think?
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The PortableApps.com website currently is down – for whatever reason.
portableapps.com seems to be down. It just might be that someone took the
portable Apache thumb drive with him.
sit e is down …. bummer!
The site’s been Slashdotted.
Unfortunately, I think that was my doing (I submitted it there). Hope it gets back up and running soon, though; it’s a nifty little project!
You can obtain the Portable OpenOffice package from Sourceforge, though: http://sourcefo...ects/portableoo
web site 401 you with this nice message
Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /news/2005-08-12-portable_firefox_1.5_released on this server.
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
I’ve been trying for the last 45 minutes and no luck. Site is down. That’s a dumb thumb idea.
WC2, a dumb thumb idea? How so? Sounds like a great use of a thumbdrive to me.
Ow, slashdotteded…
I just hope they pay a fixed monthly charge and not a amount that varies depending on how much bandwidth they use like some sites do.
Howdy. Thanks for the link.
The Slashdotting wasn’t TOO bad. The problem was PortableApps.com ended up on the Digg.com homepage at the SAME TIME as Slashdot. It was pushing out over 1MBit/sec from a shared box before the host temporarily disabled it. I had static pages up within an hour or so. The site is mostly back to normal now. Sadly, I’ve had to delay announcements of two new portable apps due to the traffic overload. I’m looking into dedicated hosts now.
Glad to hear you made it through, John. Slashdot can certainly be a mixed blessing. Not sure what your hosting needs will be, but if you’re in the market, I can highly recommend the folks at JaguarPC.com (Sadly, I don’t get any referral fee for mentioning ‘em, but I’ve been quite happy with their services so far). We survived a couple of Slashdot hits last year on a shared box. Never had the double Whammy though!