Volume 2, Issue 4

April 2007
Copyright 2007 Claire J Rottenberg

(Revised May 2008)

Welcome to the April issue of our ezine for Mac OS X users. Since this is US tax month, I'm focusing this month on using Mac OS X to help you manage your finances.

Table of Contents

1. Article: Managing Your Finances with Mac OS X
2. Tutorial: Creating a Spreadsheet Budget
3. Featured Free Software: Balance
4. Tip of the Month: Complete Tax Forms with Preview
5. Websites of the Month: OpenOffice Calc Documentation Sources

1.  Article:   Managing Your Finances with Mac OS X

2.  Tutorial:   Creating a Spreadsheet Budget

3.  Featured Free Software: Balance

Developer: Martin Davidsson
http://www.stanford.edu/~mhdavids/cs193e/balance.html

Balance is a free, easy-to-use, no frills personal finance program that lets you keep track of your money. You can add accounts, record debits and credits, create categories, and view a graph of expenses. The program totals your net worth and displays it under the amounts for your accounts. To record an expense, you simply type a minus sign (-) in front of the amount and Balance will subtract the figure from the account's balance.

If your needs for a financial program are basic and you don't want to spend money just to balance your checkbook and keep track of your expenses, Balance might be a good solution.

4.  Tip of the Month:   Complete Tax Forms with Preview

Did you know you can complete PDF forms using Apple's Preview application? It's the perfect way to complete this year's tax forms and have neatly typed, printed copies for the IRS and your records. In addition, you can save a completed form as a new PDF file and have a digital record as well as a printed one.

If tax forms for your country are available in PDF format, all you need to do is download the form and duplicate it. Rename the duplicate copy, open it with Preview and fill-in the necessary data. Print two copies (one for the IRS and one for your records) and then use the "Save as PDF" option in the Print pane to create a permanent digital record.

There are two important things to note. First, once you've saved the document, you can't make changes to it, so be sure and duplicate the original form before using it. Second, for some unknown reason, Preview couldn't correctly save the US tax form I used with the usual Save command but it worked perfectly with the "Save as PDF" command, so use this latter option to create your digital record.

5.  Websites of the Month: OpenOffice.org Calc Documentation Source

NeoOffice 2 is an excellent free office suite that includes a spreadsheet program, so I'm showcasing a website that has good tutorials for using the Calc program in OpenOffice.org. NeoOffice is the Mac OS X version of OpenOffice.org so the instructions in the documentation on this site also applies to NeoOffice.

LearnOpenOffice.org
http://www.learnopenoffice.org/calccontents.htm

LearnOpenOffice.org is a site with visual tutorials. It has three categories of tutorials - Introduction, Intermediate and Advanced. The tutorials consist of short, but detailed enough, written instructions for one task (for example, changing a cell's background color), accompanied by a screenshot.

Disclaimer: All trademarks and products mentioned in this ezine are assumed to be the property of their owners and no infringement of rights is intended through mention of the products in this ezine.

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