Some Notes on the Machines

Lots and lots of interesting apps can be installed easily, and across distros, with Snapcraft:

snapcraft.io/store

Recently a Microsoft page on the subject went missing, and the replacement doesn’t seem to work in any browser. Here’s a regularly updated one from ZDNet with just Windows and Office:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/when-will-microsoft-pull-the-plug-on-your-version-of-windows-or-office/

This one is very good:
http://lucidchart.com

This page appears a bit outdated, but it should still work:

https://www.stat.tamu.edu/~henrik/GSWriter/GSWriter.html

Looking rather interesting so far; it is very multiplatform:

http://www.qupzilla.com

Here’s Flash Player:

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/distribution3.html

and here’s Reader:

http://get.adobe.com/reader/enterprise/

Microsoft says:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/213904

that this is due to accumulating cell format IDs over time, when Excel documents have been used and updated over and over again. Microsoft says that this can be prevented in new Excel files by keeping Excel up to date, but does not give an automatic solution this way. Instead, when the problem is seen, we have to run a utility on the Excel file throwing the error. I found a very small binary in the SkyDrive account referred-to in the article above, called XLCleaner; this works quite well. I did not choose any of the checkboxes in my testing, they look like they might alter spreadsheet contents, and they did not appear to be necessary.