I Need Help!
In more ways than one....
Don't worry, I'm creating another post in another window, it will be up shortly, but here's my problem that I could use your help with.
Wednesday I have a huge 10 page lit review due using 300 pages of different articles. (In case you're wondering, it's for Research Methods and my hypothesis is that Fraternity members have more premarital sex than other students in college. I'm not trying to re-invent the wheel here. However, I have found some really interesting articles so I'm tweaking my thesis, if you will, to generalize that Fraternity membership socializes it's members to have more premarital sex, be more gender traditional, and in that sense, be more degrading towards women. No offense to frat members, I myself am a Tri-Delt...)
There I go, damn digressing again.
Here is my problem: My free trial version of Microsoft Word has expired. I've tried figuring out how to purchase it online, but it's about $250 dollars, and I think that's a bunch of crap. Since I don't want to spend all day tomorrow in the Library of State U (I do have some assimilation of a social life) I'm wondering if any of you know of any online word processing programs that could help me? Otherwise I'm going to be stuck writing it in Note Pad and e-mailing it to myself and then trying to format it early in the morning on Wednesday...
Please let me know if you know anything!
Waitress
Don't worry, I'm creating another post in another window, it will be up shortly, but here's my problem that I could use your help with.
Wednesday I have a huge 10 page lit review due using 300 pages of different articles. (In case you're wondering, it's for Research Methods and my hypothesis is that Fraternity members have more premarital sex than other students in college. I'm not trying to re-invent the wheel here. However, I have found some really interesting articles so I'm tweaking my thesis, if you will, to generalize that Fraternity membership socializes it's members to have more premarital sex, be more gender traditional, and in that sense, be more degrading towards women. No offense to frat members, I myself am a Tri-Delt...)
There I go, damn digressing again.
Here is my problem: My free trial version of Microsoft Word has expired. I've tried figuring out how to purchase it online, but it's about $250 dollars, and I think that's a bunch of crap. Since I don't want to spend all day tomorrow in the Library of State U (I do have some assimilation of a social life) I'm wondering if any of you know of any online word processing programs that could help me? Otherwise I'm going to be stuck writing it in Note Pad and e-mailing it to myself and then trying to format it early in the morning on Wednesday...
Please let me know if you know anything!
Waitress
posted by Jennifer at 12:28 PM
33 Comments:
Open Office! It's a free, open-source word processing program with a lot of the same bells & whistles as MS Word. Google 'open office' and it should come up. No interest in the company - I've just had good luck with it over the years :-)
There's a student version of office with word, excel, powerpoint, etc, that you can buy for cheaper than $250.
AbiSource - Open Source for the Desktop. A free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. I dowloaded it for a wrok computer not licensed with MS Word. It works well.
Good Luck!
Open Office would get a second from me. I've used it, and moving from Office to Open Office is pretty simple. OpenOffice.org
Lobster Boy
looks like several other people beat me to it.
OpenOffice is great. Especially if you just need a word processor.
Thank you chloe and Lobster boy! I just finished downloading Open Office (it took like, an hour, and locked my poor computer up for a while) but it is the poop! It looks just like word. Now, can i open an office document in microsoft word? I.E. when i write my lit review, can I print it out at state U?
thanks also flambeaux!
Make sure the file extension is .doc and you should be ok. And while you're at State U, ask the IT desk if they have a student version of office available for purchase. My college did, $10.
I use open office and it rocks and everything you do in word or open office can be opened no problem in the other software.
it's great. and it's free.
how sweet it is.
You can download Microsoft Office Word Viewer and use it to format from any rich text source.
OpenOffice will also let you save to PDF -- very useful if you don't want to rely upon the computer you print out from having the right font installed or the languages you need installed. (I speak from the PoV of somebody who spends probably too much time typing in other languages, though.)
You did say online word processor.
Openoffice is very awesome, and it sounds like it's working out for you, but if you or anyone else ever needs it, www.writely.com is pretty useful. Also its been bought by google so you can login with a standard google account.
On an aside, and just of curiosity, how are you going to determine that specific direction of correlation between frat membership and premarital sex? Could it be that those disposed to premarital sex are more inclined toward fraternity membership, or that a third unknown confound predicts both? You've probably got it covered. Good luck :)
anon: using a cohort study done at the Univ Of Some other College besides mine (or SOCBM for short). The survey questions were simple: are you in a frat *yes, no* Have you ever had sex *yes no*, how many times in the last two months *open ended*.
There were many questions on the survey, that was just a topic of interest for me.
So, in order to actually show the correlation all you do is plug the data into SPSS and chart it. Then you can control for gender, greek status, or both to determine causality.
My biggest problem is going to be in the discussion. I'm hypothesising that because fraternities are organizations of "hypermasuclinity" and are characteristic of traditional gender roles among members, which is characteristic to high rates of coersive sexual practices, then fraternity members exude high rates of coercive sexual practices. The only problem i will run into is whether or not a fraternity socializes it's members to be that way, or if the guys were already like that which is why they joined said fraternity. the classic "does X cause Y or does Y cause X."
You've already got a ton of helpful responses, but I just wanted to add that I got Microsoft Office free by using www.limewirecom. Look it up and see what you think. The only problem is that there's a danger of catching viruses and that the downloading takes a long time, but it's completely free.
It's not free but - there's a student version of MS Office that's half the price of the full version. It's a good alternative, and useful to have.
Check out Writely. It's an online version of word, recently taken over by Google.
I second openoffice.org
i'm surprised you have to pay anyting at your college, at Texas Tech, we get all of office for free
Great thesis topic! I have degrees in Psychology & Higher Education. Wish I could share some of my higher ed books w/ you! Lots of good resources in there.
Might I suggest for comparison surveying Males who live in co-educational housing? Such as the Residence Hall on campus?
I use to manage an all-female Residence Hall. When the campus started shifting to co-educational housing, some of the parents had concerns. Our research found that young adult males who live in co-ed environments are less likely to commit sex crimes, etc. Something about how they develop a family or sisterly relationship w/ the females living around them, thereby becoming more protective of them. Whereas, in an all-male fraternity the exact opposite can happen.
I babble, sorry you hit my area of interest! Good luck w/ your paper.
Well someone already beat me to it, but I was able to purchase my copy of Office for Mac at a fraction of the price through my university. If you want something more permanent, check it out.
I'll chime OpenOffice.org again.
Like micro$oft product but free, (and some thikn better as well)
reads and writes .doc format...
dear anon in psych:
unfortunatly, the study we were made to go by in order to formulate our hypothesis had nothing mentioned about co-educational residence/housing. However, i did come across some articles/jounal studies done on fraternity "little sisters" and the rates of sexual coersion/opression/objectification that goes on more rampant in those environments.
you might try googling crack microsoft office.
i am amazed at how much software my husband has been able to crack just like that.
I also vote for Open Office, expecially if you are used to Microsoft Word.
Hey. First anonymous again (all you other anonymous' are just posers :P)
It's that direction of causation (X->Y or Y->X) that I was asking about. You could also include another possibility in your discussion: Z->X && Z->Y. They love it when you explore everything that could possibly be wrong with your arrangement. Z could be something like societal values or peer pressure, that causes some people to go be frat boys as well as go have sex, but the two don't necessarily need to influence each other at all.
If you need it (though you seem perfectly happy with openoffice, and rightly so), my domain name is dionysus.net.nz, my first name is chris, and my email address is a simple combination of that. (Beat that, spambot!) Not that I endorse piracy or anything, but sometimes when I'm emailed about that kind of thing, I type a string of random numbers and letters into my response.
Stick it to the man,
Chris (BSc Psychology [in 3 weeks])
Chris:
What i have so far in explaining the fallacy is a wonderful longitudinal cohort study done where students (as freshman and as seniors) were asked to rate on a likert scale (ex 1 being not high and 5 being very high) the amount of sexual permissiveness they recieved from their peer groups. Incoming males (non-greek bc of freshman) reported higher rates of sexual permissive ideas from their friends than did women. As seniors, the same men (some of whom are now in a frat) took the survey again. Results show that men who later joined a fraternity showed a statistically significan increase in sexual permissive ideas from their peer group than did men who did not join frats. This is a good use of Frat's cause sexually permissive ideals.
I also have an article from a woman who "posed" in a frat for a year. this frat had eliminated it's pledge process, and she found that it was a combination of the two, that YES frat's socialize their members to be more sexually permissive and opressive to women, but also men who already had these ideals joined frats, therefore guaranteeing the reinforcement of these ideals from generation to generation.
Hit me up on messenger sometime, i'm too tired to figure out your email address.
Nice. I'm hoping that explaining it to someone helps solidify things in your head as much as mine, or I haven't just wasted your time :)
Best of luck,
Chris.
This won't help for your problem the other day, but may help in the future.
See if you can get it for very cheap through your school. Texas A&M offers Office Professional to its students for $15.
Open Office is similar to Microsoft Word.
http://www.openoffice.org/ for more information
Are you in Student Affairs? Or Higher Education? Your classes all sound similar to mine...
Sociology. what are you?
Counseling and Student Personnel... basically working with college students. Apparently you need a masters degree to do it.
I'm chiming in late, yes - try Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Free, online, simple, and powerful enough for most all your casual to semi-serious word processing. All the documents are saved and archived for you so you can work on them from any place in the world. You can also save and export your docs as PDF files as well.
Best of all, it keeps a revision history so you can go back to your old versions whenever you want.
I don't like OpenOffice b/c it runs pretty slowly compared to MS Word. Yes, it's free, but it's also confusing - shortcuts are different, and there are things in there that you'd wish it would do but it doesn't.
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