Taming OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org (OOo) is a suite of programs for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases and drawings. It is free to download, use and distribute. It is available in many languages and runs on Linux, Mac, Windows, Solaris, and other operating systems. You can get it from the OpenOffice.org website. Mac PPC users look here.

A good introduction is Introducing OpenOffice.org (PDF).

Scroll down to see recent posts in this blog.

Books on OpenOffice.org: In addition to the books listed in the sidebar, others are given on this page and in the books section of the Support page at OpenOffice.org.

What’s on this site?

Comments, tips, and pointers to articles written by other people about the various components of OpenOffice.org. Click on the links in the navigation bar at the top of any page, or search the blog.

A book in progress. Working title “Self-publishing using OpenOffice.org”.

Note: Some of the material on this site may be out of date. Some of it was originally written for OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 and has not been updated for OOo 2 or OOo 3. Some details have changed, but the general information is still relevant. I am updating the pages as I find time.

You can now read and comment on the first draft of “Self-publishing using OOo 3 Writer” online. The book starts here.

Comments are moderated (to eliminate spam). I will be travelling during the next week, with limited internet access (perhaps only once a day), so do not be alarmed if your comments do not appear quickly. If you prefer not to comment in public, please feel free to send me an email instead.

You can still request a PDF version of this draft.

A complete first draft of my book Self-Publishing using OpenOffice.org 3 Writer is now available in PDF (3.5MB). If you want a review copy, please contact me directly and ask for one.

I hope to get the website copy of the book updated and ready for online comments within the next few days.

You can help by telling me about anything that

• doesn’t make sense
• is out of logical order
• is covered in not enough detail
• is covered in too much detail for the audience of the book
• needs more or better illustrations
• is missing from the book but you think should be covered
• is covered in two places but should be combined into one place
• or anything else that you think would make the book more useful for the audience

At this point, please confine your comments to the content, not the inconsistencies of formatting or screen captures or bad page breaks or similar, most of which I am well aware of but unwilling to spend time fixing until I’m confident that I won’t be rewriting or deleting whole sections.

Please don’t buy from Amazon.com the three OOo3.0 books by the OOoAuthors team (Getting Started, Writer Guide, and Impress Guide) being sold there, because they have been republished by someone not associated with OOoAuthors nor (as far as I can tell) associated with OpenOffice.org in any way.

This is legal under the Creative Commons license we are using, but it does put money into someone’s pocket when they haven’t contributed. The small amount of profits from sale of the Getting Started and the Writer guides through Lulu.com (see sidebar on right) will be distributed in ways to benefit the OpenOffice.org community, though the group has not yet decided just what those ways will be.

Why aren’t we selling those books ourselves through Amazon.com? It’s a long story, involving extra costs and hassles related to Friends of OpenDocument Inc (the actual publishers of the printed books) not being a US-based organisation, and the technical requirements for book files for on-demand printing and distribution beyond Lulu.com. None of this is insurmountable, but it takes time and effort away from writing new material and keeping older material up to date.

The first draft of the OpenOffice.org 3.x Calc Guide chapters is now complete, and some chapters have been reviewed once. I have updated them to include the new features for OOo3.1. The draft is on the Documentation wiki (though not all the latest updates are on the wiki yet) and on the OOoAuthors website (PDFs of the individual chapters). PDFs should go on the Documentation Project’s website within a few days.

While trying to write a section of the Calc Guide about linking to external data, I found the Help information inadequate. It probably makes sense if you already understand the process. I searched for information but found nothing further. So I spent an afternoon testing what happens and wrote this page to explain it. This info is now also part of the draft Calc Guide.

No doubt I’ve missed something, or got something wrong, so do let me know if you find an error or omission in the article.

OpenOffice.org 3.1, scheduled for release on 26 March, has some great new features. You can read all about them on the OOo website.

Today I finally found time to finish the first draft of Chapter 4 (Charts and Graphs) of the Calc Guide. I have also finished a first draft of Chapter 3 (Formulas and Functions) and revisions to Chapter 10 (Using Styles and Templates in Calc). Reviewers are sought for these and other draft chapters of the book, which are on the OOo Documentation wiki; I hope to get Chapter 4 there soon. You can also get .odt files for review purposes by joining OOoAuthors.

I haven’t been making progress on this book as quickly as I’d like over the past few weeks, because I’ve been distracted by buying a new house, battening down the apartment for a cyclone (which passed us by unscathed, fortunately), and packing to move.

People searching for OpenOffice.org (or variations like Open Office) using Google have reported seeing “sponsored links” (sites which have paid for positioning at the top of Google search results pages) that charge users to download OpenOffice.org. Some of these sites look quite professional and could easily be mistaken for official download sites by newcomers who are unaware that OOo is always available free from the real OpenOffice.org website. While it is legal to sell OpenOffice.org, the wording on these sites (and in their terms and conditions) is often quite misleading, downloads from them provide no added value, and users who later find they’ve been duped cannot get a refund (per the sites’ terms and conditions).

Some of these sites say the payment is for support, but evidence (in the form of questions on the official OOo users’ list and forums, in which people say they have registered and paid money, and are now having various problems with the program) suggests that the support is often (always?) actually provided by the OOo community, not the download sites.

I won’t mention any of these sites specifically here (why give them publicity?), but I do encourage readers of this blog to avoid these sites, tell others to avoid them, and (if you are so inclined) complain to an appropriate authority about them.

Some other sites offer OOo on CD or DVD (usually for a low price: no more than $10), and/or bundle other material (PDFs of the user guides, clipart, various extensions, and so on) as a convenience to users. I don’t have any objection to people who provide such value-added services, especially since they often link to the official OOo site.

The first edition of the OOo3 Impress Guide is now available. Individual chapters and a compiled book are on the OOoAuthors website (ODT and PDF), the Documentation Project website (PDF), and the Documentation wiki.

Note: This first edition really could use some more reviewing, editing, and indexing. The choice was between publishing a (hopefully not seriously) flawed and incomplete book now, for people to use and comment on, or wait indefinitely for enough assistance to do a better job. I chose to make the info available.

If you can help with reviewing, please hop over to either OOoAuthors or the Documentation wiki. No contribution is too small!

I don’t plan to work on a printed copy any time soon, because (a) I have higher-priority things to do, (b) the OOo2 Impress Guide hasn’t sold many copies (in contrast to the Getting Started and Writer Guides for both OOo2 and OOo3), and (c) it still needs work.

OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 fixes a number of minor issues reported with OpenOffice.org 3.0. Although minor releases normally do not include new features, there are two points of interest: enhanced support for grammar checkers, and an increase in the number of words held in personal word lists to 30,000.

OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 is available now from http://download.openoffice.org/, or for more languages and platforms check http://download.openoffice.org/other.html. It is the same as Release Candidate 2, so if you already have that, you won’t need to download this one.

At the time I’m writing this post, the Mac OS X versions had not been made available through the OOo download pages, but you can get the RC2 for both Mac OS X Intel and PPC from http://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/.

The next release of OpenOffice.org to contain significant new user features will be OpenOffice.org 3.1, scheduled for general availability at the end of March. As I noted in this post, OOoNinja has a great summary of what’s coming with that release.

Now if we could only get the user guides updated as fast as the programmers update the program itself, all would be truly fine! More help is desperately needed at Documentation.