Nerd's delight

It's Spring Break here in Pembroke (and the weather is indeed spring-like), and people tend to think that this means profs are on vacation. Not quite. Still, it's nice not to go to classes for a week and take care of those things that one usually has to squeeze into one's schedule. Today I did the data analysis for a paper on the conditions under which the Attitudinal Model is more useful than a fact-pattern model to predict Supreme Court behavior. Also, I'm working on a new advising website for the UNCP political science department, have a couple of recommendation letters to write, classes to prep, etc.

And I have some time to try new computer programs. I find it annoying that Microsoft Word and Excel, two programs I use extensively, are so slow loading on my two-year old laptop (not to talk about my three-year old office computer). So I've been testing Gnumeric Spreadsheet and AbiWord. Both are free open-source programs, and they are comparatively small (AbiWord -- including a number of plugins -- takes less than 50 MB on my computer, and Gnumeric is about 67 MB).

Gnumeric looks like a complete Excel clone. It seems to do everything that Excel does, and using it for a number of bar charts this afternoon was a breeze. One can load Excel spreadsheets, comma-separated files, and other formats. Excel spreadsheets maintain the original formatting, including background colors, etc., which is essential if I want to use my Excel gradebooks. The only drawback may come with really large data sets (256 variables, 65,536 cases -- quite a class size), but it seems to be possible to tweak the program so that it deals with such an amount of data. (In that case, however, I'd prefer to use a real stats program. One can load basically anything into R.)

AbiWord *is* fast, and it is able to load and save Word documents (and has a bunch of plugins to open WordPerfect and other formats). For me, the main attraction is that one can use LaTeX code to write mathematical formulas, which is much less bothersome (in my opinion) than clicking your way through the Microsoft equation editor. This is useful for collaborations with authors who do not know how to use LaTeX. The downside for such purposes, however, is that the revisions tool is less developed than the MS Word change tracking tool. In addition, Endnote does not have a plugin for AbiWord. In contrast to MS Word, one has to save the document as an rtf file and then scan it "manually" with Endnote to create footnotes, references, or a bibliography. But my main purpose right now is to have a fast WYSIWYG word processor, and AbiWord seems to do the job.