words

Finally. After years of to-ing and fro-ing from the courtroom, a U.S. judge has ended a lawsuit that reaches back as far as the launch of Windows 95.

Following an eight-week trial ending in December with a hung jury, Novell was pressing for close to $1 billion in damages for antitrust violations committed by Microsoft while Microsoft founder Bill Gates was still at the helm.

But today,  U.S. District Judge Frederick Motz ruled that Novell can no longer pursue the case against Microsoft.

In the ruling, Motz wrote:

"Although Novell presented evidence from which a jury … Read more

As you've no doubt heard by now, Microsoft just announced Office 2013 and The New Microsoft Office suite.

Not announced: pricing.

Call it a hunch, but I suspect Microsoft will charge at least as much for Office 2013 as it does for Office 2010. After all, the new suite is chock-full of new features, giving Microsoft ample justification for keeping prices the same -- or even raising them.

Currently, Office 2010 Home and Student and Office 2010 Home and Business sell for $119.99 and $199.99, respectively. That's for a single-user license. The three-user version of Home … Read more

The first time I heard someone say "Everybody has a book in them," I recommended that they see a doctor right away.

At least that explains all those books I've read that appear to have traveled through the author's colon. Writing can be painful, but there are limits.

Lots of people have unpublished novels and other book-length documents sitting forlornly on their hard drive, waiting and waiting for an audience. If your magnum opus (or even half-pint opus) is a Word document that's ready for the world to fall in love with, give the free … Read more

Google is driving serious economic activity in the U.S. -- at least, that is, according to Google.

The search giant today unveiled its 2011 Economic Impact report, and said that its search and advertising tools, including AdWords and AdSense, drove $80 billion in economic activity across the U.S. last year. The company said it reached that figure with help from "1.8 million businesses, Web site publishers, and non-profits across the U.S."

In order to arrive at that figure, Google used some fancy math. The company estimates that businesses that use AdWords make $2 in … Read more

Matching with Friends (2.99, full version - Free, ad-supported version) is another in a long line of Zynga apps that let you play turn-based games with a friend on mobile devices. But instead of playing word games loosely based on Hangman, Scrabble, or Boggle, this time you'll be strategically placing matching colored blocks on a gameboard, then sending your move to a friend.

Like other Zynga games, Matching with Friends makes getting connected with your friends easy. Upon launch you'll be asked to sign in through either your Facebook or Twitter account. Once logged in, you can search for other players from your friends list or get automatically matched with a random player.… Read more

Spelltower is a well-made word-puzzle game with a stylish feel and enough built-in variants to justify its price tag.

The gameplay should be familiar to word-game fans: you find words on a grid of letters, which you can trace over horizontally, vertically, or diagonally (even overlapping the path that you trace) to form words and remove the letters. Spelltower's innovation is stacking its grid in a tower--so that when you create a word, you remove all adjacent letters, dropping down all the letters above accordingly. This adds another satisfying layer of think-ahead strategy, as you're looking for not … Read more

Some people still snicker when they see a coworker toting an iPad. After all, who can get any real work done on that Etch-a-Sketch on steroids?

Lots of people, actually. And as the quality and quantity of iPad apps increase, the devices inch closer to becoming workplace essentials.

Case in point: the free CloudOn program whose mobile versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint give you the Office 2007/2010 interface when working on files stored on the Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box online storage services.

Support for Office XML file types, and a ribbon to boot Speculation continues as to … Read more

In the annals of computer history, no two keystroke combinations have done more to boost worker productivity than Ctrl-C to copy to the clipboard whatever you've selected on the screen, and Ctrl-V to paste the contents of the clipboard to wherever you've placed the cursor.

What often follows the paste is the laborious process of reformatting the pasted material to match the look of the destination document. Microsoft Word lets you apply the formatting of the destination document when you paste, but by default Ctrl-V retains the original formatting of the pasted text.

Back in 2007 I described … Read more

All those Bree Serif, Kaushan Script, and Lovers Quarrel font fans will now be able to bring into play these different scripts while working in Google Docs. The Web giant announced today that it is adding 450 new fonts and 60 new templates to its word processing program.

"Often the best way to get your point across is to present your idea in a creative, captivating way," Google software engineer Isabella Ip wrote in a company blog post. "Today, we added over 450 new fonts to Google documents to make it easier for you to add a … Read more