Writer

Writer is the word processor component of OpenOffice.org.

Books on OOo Writer

The OOoAuthors team has produced a user guide for Writer 3.

Cover of OpenOffice.org 3 Writer GuideOpenOffice.org 3 Writer Guide, second edition, April 2010. ISBN 978-1921320064. You can get the full book, or individual chapters, designed for onscreen reading, from the OOo Documentation Project. You can also buy a printed copy.

See also the many books on OOo listed on this page.

Of historical interest

The following information was written for OOo 1.x or 2.x. It may not be relevant to OOo 3.x.

Evaluating OOo Writer

I have mainly used Writer, the word processing component (equivalent to Microsoft Word), but OpenOffice includes the other standard office suite components as well: spreadsheets, presentations, drawing, and web publishing. In version 2.0, it also includes a database component.

My impression, after using OOo for over two years, is that if you have to share OOoWriter files with Microsoft Word users, you may run into conversion problems, depending on which Word or Writer features you’ve used. However, if conversion to and from Word isn’t an issue, this is a great tool, with some features that Word doesn’t have (but many Word users want) and some different ways of doing things that at first look seem like better ways. Some details are here:

Here are some other evaluations, by Bruce Byfield:

Here is some how-to information about using OOoWriter:

Tips for using OOo Writer

I recommend Solveig Haugland’s blog, which is full of great explanations, hints, and tips on using OpenOffice.org. Here are some examples of her work on Writer:

I also highly recommend Bruce Byfield’s blog and other articles written for LinuxJournal. Here are some of them:

Page last updated 8 December 2010.

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