Bournemouth — Feb 16th 2010

Despite rain and terrible traffic problems there was a very good attendance - 14 people were there to see a demo of some of the basic features of Numbers by Marco of the Solutions staff. We were greted by Lucy, the store manageress, annd that is an indication of the fresh and helpful approach that Solutions will be taking towards our Group.

While Numbers is an easy spreadsheet to set up and use it will not replace Excel as a powerful business tool. Nevertheless it is more tnah adequate for home use and is certainly a lot prettier if you want to spned the time to add graphics (very easily done) Another good point is that the basic functions are to hand rather than secreted away in menus.

The second part of the proceedings had members displaying - or in one case talking about! - their favourite free applications with the aim of a vote being taken. However the demonstration by Richard Furberm the Retail Manager of Solutions group, who had come all the way from Brighton to see how our meeting was functioning. Richard had previously expressed concern at the levels of attendance in view of the cost to Solutions of keeping the store open for us and was very pleased to see the numbers present! His demonstration of Google's free Sketch-up was stunning - the simplicity may not be quite as he showed it since he has used it for some time, but it is certainly an application worth learning. The other applications demonstrated were:

1.Snagit Screen capture programme which allows annotation of the
capture

2 Jing Records screen activity as a movie file - very useful in demos

3 VLC Plays videos - I slightly lost the plot on thhis one

4 GIFfun Makes animated GIFs

5 pearlLabelizer Label maker from Address Book

6 Mac the Ripper Copies all sorts of DVDs to a hard drive

7 Handbrake Copies tracks from DVDs

8 Garage Buy Makes buying on eBay easy

9 Screencasts Online Web site with occasional free demos

10 DiskInventory X Graphic representation of disk contents

Comments

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Roy Rainford said…

A lively evening with interesting, helpful, useful discussion and inputs. Many thanks to the presenters and to Michael of course.

David Fleetwood said…

I fully agree with Roy - best meeting yet that I have been to in Bournemouth. It was only missing erudite input from Euan!
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