Some time ago I was asked by Oxford University Press to write an article for their Library Magazine about which document format is better: pdf or xml. I defended pdf and following is my text. Martin Fenner defended xml. You can download both contributions as pdf file (!) here.

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Summary
This post is the ultimate, mobile-site-friendly, migration guide from Outlook to Thunderbird. If you want the short version, go immediately to the section To wrap it all up. The author describes in detail the design flaws in Microsoft’s Outlook and how these shortcomings are avoided in Thunderbird. If you need a Windows program to handle a large number of email messages coming from various accounts the open source and free Thunderbird should be your choice. With this guide Outlook will be history.

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Abstract
In this post I have tested several solutions for slide sharing. I found the free product of SlideBoom to be superior.

Introduction
Scientific presentations are nowadays delivered in a form where the focus is on the presentation of slides. Old-fashioned people claim  – and complain – that a presentation with blackboard and chalk is a much better form of communication. This almost obsolete style is to be preferred in a limited number of cases only. For instance when you are lecturing to students and you really want to go slowly through a sequential line of arguments, like a full mathematical derivation. In all other cases the era of PowerPoint is a blessing. Both for presenters and for audiences.

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Scientists’s desk
What general office software is useful for scientists? I come to the following enumeration: an email client, a calendar manager, a browser, a document formatter (for non-scientific papers), a spreadsheet and presentation software. Microsoft sells software providing all these functionalities, and indeed many scientists use the Microsoft products Outlook, Internet Explorer, MS-Word, MS-Excel and MS-PowerPoint. However, with free – technically speaking – superior products Google is now challenging the leading position of Microsoft in this traditionally Microsoft territory


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