Asus Eee PC Easy Mode Work Tab Options Tour

Here is the 2nd installment of the Easy Mode user interface tutorial -

The Work tab, as shown, below, has nine options.




These are –

• Accessories
• Documents
• Spreadsheets
• Presentation
• PDF Reader
• Mail
• File Manager
• Dictionary
• Notes

If you have gone through the Internet options in the first installment, you would have noticed how similar the Easy Mode user interface is to that of Microsoft Windows.

Asus has actually taken it a step further by including applications that not only replicate those found in Microsoft Office; they are also compatible with it. Meaning, the documents you create using these applications can be opened and read by Microsoft Office.

However, the arrangement or structure Asus used is slightly different. At any rate, we will discuss the difference as we move along.


Work - Accessories

Clicking on the Accessories option brings up the Accessories window as shown below.




There are three applications.

Calculator

The Calculator is KCalc, an open source application that is actually full-featured. On start-up, it shows a simple interface featuring basic functionality.




However, you can set it up to also show trigonometric, statistics, logic, exp/log, and constants simultaneously as seen below.





PIM

The PIM, which stands for Personal Information Manager, is the PIM from KDE. It is similar to Microsoft Outlook both in function and in lay-out.





Screen Capture

The Screen Capture is a convenient utility that lets you capture screens. It was used to make the screen caps included in this tutorial.





Work - Documents

The next three options – Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations - actually load OpenOffice, which is the open source equivalent of Microsoft Office.

You can get more information, including any future free updates from their website at http://www.openoffice.org.




Clicking on any of the three options will bring up the OpenOffice loading flash screen (below) before loading the actual application. In this example we click on the Documents option (above).




Clicking on the Documents option opens OpenOffice Writer, which is largely compatible with Microsoft Word except that it is missing the more advanced features such as Smart Tags, highly flexible outlining, and smart table formatting.





Work – Spreadsheets




Clicking on the Spreedsheets option (above) will bring up OpenOffice Calc (below), which offers Microsoft Excel compatibility including macros and tables.





Work – Presentations




Clicking on the Presentations option (above) will bring up OpenOffice Impress (below), which offers Microsoft Powerpoint functionality and compatibility.




If it is your first time to use Impress, a Presentation Wizard will automatically pop up and guide you through setting up your presentation. By default, Impress will do this every time you use it. You can disable this by clicking on Do not show this wizard again to put an x on the box before it.











PDF Reader


Clicking on the PDF Reader option opens up Adobe Reader (below), which reads PDF formatted documents.




Adobe Reader itself is free and you may want to check for upgrades at http://www.adobe.com/products/reader.





Mail




Clicking on the Mail option opens up the Mozilla Thunderbird client. If you have not set-up any account, the Account Wizard will pop up. Note that it has a Gmail wizard.





File Manager





Clicking on the File Manager option (above) opens, well, the File Manager from KDE. For Windows users, the lay-out should be conveniently familiar.





Dictionary




Clicking on the Dictionary option loads the Longman Dictionary as shown below.




More than just an ordinary dictionary, it also includes English to Chinese translation.





Notes




Clicking on the Notes option (above) opens the sticky note utility.




You can access its menu by right-clicking on the note’s time bar. Its main menu can be accessed by the sticky icon that appears on the system tray.