I’m one-third of the way through the first pass.
Following up on the previous notes:
- The rate of malware occurrences has slowed down (but I can see that a whole bunch of journals from the most problematic nation are coming up soon).
- Indonesian OAstill seems to have a malware problem. At this point, of 120 Indonesian OA titles checked, 36 are flagged by Malwarebytes Pro as either being malicious or having malware-infected segments. That’s four more infections of 17 more journals.
- Other malware: 9 of 155 in Romania: 57 more journals, no new infections. 4 of 329 in Brazil: 149 more journals. one more infection. Two of 13 in Ukraine–four more journals, no more infections. Six countries with one malware case each: five more than previously.
- I’m hoping these will mostly resolve themselves on the second pass (or the third malware-only pass). I will not bypass Malwarebytes or Windows Defender protection. Period. Been there, done that, spent days fixing things.
- Note that there were only 67 journals flagged as malware in last year’s pass. I now have 57 flagged out of the first 3,600–with more than 7,100 left to go. The rate has gone down dramatically–but it’s far too high.
And a new note, only indirectly about the study. As I’d noted elsewhere, I seem to be having occasional system instability problems (although doing a full shutdown or restart once every day or so seems to be helping and only costs 2-3 minutes of lost time).
I thought I’d try LibreOffice instead of Excel, to see whether that would help with the problem; I’ve long suggested LibreOffice as a substitute for people who want Office functionality but either (a) despise Microsoft or (b) legitimately can’t afford $100 for Office.
After the lengthy process of updating to the latest version, I tried opening both spreadsheets and working with them. Unfortunately, what I found was:
- LibreOffice, faced with medium-sized spreadsheets (one’s about 400KB and currently has 3,600 rows of about 20 columns, with no formulas; the other has the same columns and lack of formulas but currently about 10,100 rows), was jerky: attempts to move around or adjust the window size were slow and erratic.
- One or two functions that I use regularly (e.g., column autowidth) just aren’t there.
- I found the integrated icon-based control bars confusing–but that’s because I’m now very comfortable with Office 2013’s contextual control bars.
After 10-15 minutes, always feeling that I was waiting for LO to catch up, I gave up.
(Notably, when I’d tried a similar experiment as a Word replacement, functions I consider necessary just weren’t there–but then, I create full-fledged books in Word, making more typographic control demands than the average user.)
I still think LibreOffice is a good no-cost alternative, especially for casual use. But, frankly, the price for Office seems like a bargain (no, I don’t use Office360: $100/year still doesn’t seem like a bargain.)
