I finally saw it, late last night. I felt a knot in my gut get tighter and tighter as the scenes passed and the drama of desperation accumulated. But other than that, the movie did not cause any intense or unusual emotional disturbance in me. I thought it was exceptionally, commendably well done. DW even went with me, and for once, we both came through about identically, emotionally. DW was offended because it seemed to her like the military characters were singled out for put-downs. It looked to her like there was an imbalance of portrayal of the military folks, compared to the other responders, as the least intelligent, most disorganized and otherwise most inept. I didn't take it that way, although I understand why she would. But really, the attacks were not something anyone was well-rehearsed in responding to. (Who's all set to execute plans to respond to an earthquake in Chicago? Or a bee swarm in a shopping mall, for that matter?) There probably would have been unnecessary shootdowns if the President's orders had been passed. That's the kind of thing that happens simply because of the "fog of war," absent any blood lust, overreaction, or insubordination. I thought the commanders' declining to pass the shootdown orders was as brave and admirable an action as the passengers' revolt. I guess I brought that up because I'm familiar with air-to-air scenarios. For irony in personal experience, just this past week I watched The Godfather Part III on DVD. Weird movie, but I suppose it was a way to bring some kind of closure to the first two parts. Anyway, one very good line in it was: "Don't hate your enemies; it clouds your judgment." I think United 93's most clever quality was its portrayal in a way that did not strive to focus viewers' empathy toward either hijackers, or passengers, or other responders, or other less involved characters. Portrayal with any hint of "partisanship" would have disserved the public and cheapened the movie. The media are already far too full of historical portrayals that stoke already existing hatreds (and create new ones), such that too many people are fighting the war we are in with clouded judgment. It's one thing for combatants to adopt, or reject, one another's strategies, tactics, methods, ideas or styles. But it's self-defeating to the warrior who lets propaganda affect how he "feels about" his enemy. I ached after the movie, not because of it, but because there aren't more like it, especially covering the current war.

I've only found two small things so far that MS Office can do that OOo can't, and they are fairly specialized little tricks that most people would never miss. One is that the mail merge in Writer doesn't have a simple way to create a "catalog" listing, and the other is that the spreadsheet in Calc doesn't have the option to label the cells using the "R1C1" convention, which allows certain types of calculations to be formatted more quickly. Most people have no idea what I'm talking about, so most likely it wouldn't be missed. OOo will open and allow you to work with documents created in MS Office. You just have to remember to "save as" one of the Word, Excel or PowerPoint formats if you are going to use them under those programs again. Open Office has a different native format, but gives the option to save in several other formats that are compatible to other programs. I would strongly recommend downloading Open Office and giving it a try. The worst thing that can happen is that you end up buying MS Office down the road, but very likely you'll end up finding it to be just as useful.

If you want to view the presentation and save photos from it I find that I can do so using OpenOffice. After installing open office (which is free) I find that I can save a PowerPoint presentation to my computer, right click on it and select 'open with' and pick open office and it opens in the impress module of open office. The pictures are in a row on the left and I can select one then right click and copy and paste it into paint or another graphics program and save it into a folder on my computer. I don't know if you can do this with powerpoint viewer or not as I have never used it.

1. Try importing the slides from the PPTX file rather than actually opening it. Click "Insert," then "Slides From Files." Browse to and select your file, then click "Insert All." This might extract the slides from the corrupted file and place them in a fresh file, though the formatting may be lost. Checking the "Keep source formatting" box might help. 2. Try opening the presentation in Word. Open Word and click "Open" in the "File" menu. Use the "Files of type" drop-down menu to select "Recover Text From Any File," then try to open your corrupted PowerPoint file. Again, most of your formatting will probably be lost, but your data will be there. 3. Check for a TMP file. These are temporary copies of recently accessed files. There may or may not be a temporary copy of the file you want, but it's worth a shot. Right-click the "Start" button, then click "Search," and run a search for "*.TMP." The search will return many files, most of them probably with incomprehensible names. Click the "Date Modified" button to sort them according to the last time they were edited and find a file that was created around the time you lost the PowerPoint file. Try to open this in PowerPoint. 4. Try opening the file in a different application that supports the PPTX format. The most prominent of these is the Impress program in the OpenOffice suite, a free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. 5. Otherwise you may apply http://www.pptx.openfiletool.com/ PPTX Open File Tool