OpenOffice.org-more comments

From my last post, you may have guessed that I was pretty taken with Open Office .org for the Mac (and PC).
I have just finished my first modest project in Open Office.org, created in Write, with charts from Calc, diagrams from Draw and a Bibliography from ooBase. This was a report, constructed in a modified template that I found on the web. and is a total of 21 pages.
Compared to working in MS Office 2004, my normal tool for this kind of work, Open Office.org was an absolute dream to use.
Now that I have discovered most of the tools that sit in this suite working, with it is soooooooo simple. Here are a few tips that I found make life very easy when using this package.

1. Dock the Navigator (I have mine glued to the left). This tool is invaluable in jumping to specific parts of your documents, especially during an editing session.
2. Open and dock the Style panel, headings, body text etc formatting is then just a couple of clicks away.
3. Dock either the gallery (if you need clip art) or registered databases to the top of the document. adding clip art, mail merging and bibliography entries become very simple.
4. If you are not in the habit of using styles, (i could not be bothered with them in Word), dont neglect them in Open Office.org. With a docked style panel, uniform headings and sub headings are just a double click away. This makes life very easy for.......
5. Creating Tables of Contents. Its a piece of cake in OO.o.
6. Calc's charts are very good and easy to create. Though the range of chart type is not as extensive as in Excel, the best and most popular chart styles are there. I found them very easy to modify, e.g. colours, transparency, chart and axis titles etc. I have managed to create some pretty decent charts with very little effort.
7. Use Draw for diagrams such as organograms. It is very simple to use, and has a wealth of features for creating graphics.
8. If you like or use Word Art (I hate it), OOo has a similar feature, Fontworks. This is simlar to Word Art. Checkout View/Toolbars/Fontworks or look for the Fontworks icon on the Drawing toolbar.
9. Toolbars....there are lots of them. Bolt the ones you need to the documents and lock them into place. They are a huge time saver.
10. Documentation....There's lots of it. The help menu is excellent and very well thought out. For the beginner there are numerous documents that can be downloaded from http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/ . All are well written and comprehensive.
11. Search the web pages at Sun there are lots of useful templates and extensions that can be downloaded for free!


Though I use the MS Office 2003 at work every day, I have not found the need to use it at home for weeks. Open Office is just to good and easy to use to ignore and its free software too.