It's free, are you?

Prepared by Colin Charles

byte@aeon.com.my

http://www.bytebot.net/

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If you would like to use this for commercial purposes, please write to Colin Charles, at

byte@aeon.com.my or at PO BOX 8188, Monash University LPO, Clayton, Victoria, 3168, Australia.

Agenda and Goals

Learning about OpenOffice.org

The project and community

The Office Suite Applications

Writer (word processor), Calc (spreadsheet), Impress (presentation), Draw (drawing), Web (HTML Editor), Math (formula editing), Databases, Mail Merge, and others

Why OpenOffice.org?

Piracy doesn't:

Provide bug fixes, rights to steer future releases, no ability to get support for stolen software, and no building of local software industry

Microsoft has DRM

Will run on multiple platforms

Inter-operable with Microsoft Office

How it differs from other packages

Microsoft Office

Writer lacks a grammar checker; Calc has a maximum of 32,000 rows

StarOffice – Sun's commercial offering

Front-end database component (AdabasD); templates & clip-art gallery; a few file filters; fonts; support

Licensing

Dual-licensed

GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL)

Allows for unlimited commercial use

Copying and redistribution is encouraged

No more worrying about “piracy”

Where do I get help?

http://www.mackmoon.com/OOoHelpOutline.html

http://www.oooforum.org/

http://ooodocs.sf.net/

http://ooextras.sf.net/

Mailing lists on openoffice.org

OpenOffice.org 1.0 Resource Kit

OOoSwitch: 501 Things You Wanted to Know About Switching to OpenOffice.org from Microsoft Office

Niggling Linux Issues...

KDE might be preferred to, in comparison to GNOME

Lack of inter-application cut & paste

Red Hat/Mandrake – use RPM's

Debian – use apt-get

Or just get the officially built tar-balls from the website

Common Features

The entire application shares common features:

AutoCorrect

Spell Check

Thesaurus

Help

PDF Exporter

Stylist/Navigator

Online Help

Options

Sub-

topics

Hyperlink

Setting up OpenOffice.org

Tools -> Options

Enter

relevant

user data

(in this

dialog)

Some Setup Features

Font Substitution

OpenOffice.org -> Font Replacement

Turning on AutoSave

Load/Save -> General

Setting Undos & Memory Use

OpenOffice.org -> Memory

Pasting Data - Controls

Content & Formatting can be handled by “Paste Special”

Edit -> Paste Special

Paste icon on toolbar

Options dependent on what's in memory

Click & hold to get the

pull-down menu

Options of what

can the current

item in memory

can be pasted as.

The Menus & Interface

Displayed toolbars can be customized

Tools -> Configure -> Toolbars. Click Customize.

Icons may be dragged & dropped onto the function bar

The Status bar at the bottom of the screen can also be customized

Tools -> Configure -> Status Bar

Dealing with other applications

File -> AutoPilot -> Document Converter

Convert from these

platforms, to

OpenOffice.org

documents.

Printing

Printer Administration – spadmin

Linux printer should already be set-up

OOo can print to PDF's as well – this is in addition to Exporting to a PDF file.

Properties of the

printer are changed here

Add another printer that OOo can access

Creating PDF Documents

File -> Export as PDF

Options dialog:

Print optimized – good for output to a printer. Press optimized garners the largest file sizes, as the graphics are uncompressed. Screen optimized is suitable for printing, however graphics and fonts won't look as rich as they should be.

Thank You!

Colin Charles

byte@aeon.com.my

http://www.bytebot.net/

Creation of this work, in part, helped and sponsored by:

You are free:

to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work

to make derivative works

And...

For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.

Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the author.

The concept of using Open Source software may not exist with most of you yet, unless you've been immersed in a Linux platform for instance. You may think that software you get for free may be inferior to commercial offerings that you have purchased, but by the end of all of this, I hope you realize differently.

The current version that you can use is OpenOffice.org 1.1 – get it from http://www.openoffice.org/

The next target milestone will be 2.0.

Through-out the text, you may see reference to OpenOffice.org as OOo. OOo has become the accepted “short form” for referring to OpenOffice.org.

Calling OpenOffice.org “OpenOffice” for instance is not entirely correct.

It's free.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) means its illegal to reverse engineer Microsoft's file format. It also forces updates, and sharing documents with others becomes more disabled. This is rather unfortunate, but Microsoft seems to think its the right thing to do.

OpenOffice.org claims that there is a 98% compatibility rate with Microsoft Office files.

Microsoft, in Office 2003 has aimed to use full XML file format compatibility (with a few modifications), so this means things may become more compatible.

Platform support is impressive: Windows, Linux and Solaris are natively built by Sun themselves. There are Mac OS X ports, FreeBSD, Linux PPC, and many other platforms are supported as well – thanks to user defined ports.

KOffice has also decided to utilize the Oasis XML file format – so Koffice files will be fully inter-operable with OpenOffice.org files.

Writer doesn't have a grammar checker and the feature has been requested for, but to no avail – we don't expect to see this even in the 2.0 release.

Calc doesn't support more than 32,000 rows, while Excel supports 64,000 rows. Should not be an issue for many.

OpenOffice.org lacks a front-end database feature – there exists database support if you have a working back-end. AdabasD is a commercial offering from Sun, but if you're looking for a straight Microsoft Access replacement, it's not going to be easy at the moment. OpenOffice.org Base is expected for 2.0.

It lacks many usable templates, clip art, sounds, videos and so on. There are templates online available for download, at many different community-based sites.

In comparison to file filters, OpenOffice.org lacks support for importing WordPerfect 5.1 files, which StarOffice has. Work is being done to get imports working however, and there exists a 3rd-party application to get it working.

StarOffice includes Asian language fonts by default, that OpenOffice.org lacks.

Support – commercial based support exists, but not by Sun (or in Office's case, Microsoft). There are other organizations, user groups, and so on that offer support.

For more information on the LGPL and the SISSL, the Open Source Initiative have some fairly useful resources – mainly the terse legal documents to read: LGPL (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-license.php); SISSL (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/sisslpl.php)

Commercial use is allowed on any number of workstations on any number of platforms – the Office suite is completely 100% free.

Remembering that the SISSL allows proprietary use of the code, commercial use and distribution on CDROM's or even packaged products are welcome.

Commercial distribution is allowed too, and there are several companies selling them. You are however encouraged to follow the CDROM ISO standard that OpenOffice.org sets for you, and are encouraged to register with the Distribution project - http://distribution.openoffice.org/

There is never a pirated copy of OpenOffice.org!

OpenOffice.org Unofficial FAQ: http://www.bytebot.net/openoffice/faq.html

OpenOffice.org Documentation project: http://documentation.openoffice.org/

OOoMacros (for macro specific help): http://ooomacros.org/

For Mailing Lists:

announce@openoffice.org - for announcements

users@openoffice.org - for questions that users have – high volume, you may want the digest version

discuss@openoffice.org - for discussions relating to OpenOffice.org and the development – high volume, digest version exists

There are plenty of others: http://www.openoffice.org/ml_guidelines.html

With regards to Books:

Commercial material like the OpenOffice.org Resource Kit (http://www.getopenoffice.org/), or the Taming OpenOffice.org Writer (http://www.taming-openoffice-org.com/), or even the OOoSwitch book (http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalogpricelists/ooo501.htm) come in handy.

There are ClueSheets (http://www.cluesheets.com/) which are great to get you up to speed quickly.

Exercise: Install OpenOffice.org on your machine.

Red Hat Linux / Fedora / Mandrake Linux

Get your CD's, and use the appropriate package manager.

Otherwise at a console, do:

rpm -ivh <filename.rpm>

Debian

Packages required include: openoffice.org-bin, myspell-en-gb/us (a dictionary), openoffice.org-debian-files (extra Debian specific files), openoffice.org-gnome (GNOME desktop integration), openoffice.org-help-en (help files), openoffice.org-hyphenation-en-gb/us (hyphenation patterns)

If tracking the “stable” branch of Debian, the mirror's list will help: http://openoffice.debian.net/mirrors.html (if tracking “unstable”, it is included).

Tar-balls

cp OOo_*_LinuxIntel*.tar.gz ~/

tar -zxvpf OOo_*LinuxIntel*.tar.gz

cd OOo<TAB>

./setup (or ./setup -net if you're configuring it for a multi-user environment)

Exercise: Start OpenOffice.org. Play around with Writer.

AutoCorrect – Tools -> AutoCorrect. Choices for Replacements, and Exceptions, the latter being particularly useful for adding thing's like “OOo” or “CDs”, so the AutoCorrect doesn't automatically correct it to something else.

Changing a (C) to become a © is what the AutoCorrect also handles; also for common mis-spellings like “teh” as “the”.

Tools -> Spell Check -> Check. The AutoSpellcheck option can also be selected, so the red-wiggly lines are displayed at the bottom of incorrectly spelled words.

Tools -> Thesaurus – highlight a word first, then select the option. A pop-up dialog will offer replacements from the thesaurus.

Help, the PDF Export capability, as well as the Stylist and Navigator features are more in-depth topics which we will go into later.

The Help feature in OpenOffice.org is very intuitive. It covers features and the application itself in great detail, and assists by having a plentiful supply of hyperlinks – so it's easy to go around within the Help itself.

Help is non-intrusive – that is it's not an annoying paper-clip! If there's a change made, it pop's up, and it disappears automatically, leaving the user, hassle-free.

Appears at the

bottom of the

screen showing

a change has

been made

The first option allows you to edit the User Data – input information to customize your version of OpenOffice.org.

You can also change the views, the default fonts used for document creation, settings for font replacement, auto-saving, printing settings and many more.

There's individual controls for the applications, however, for examples in this section, we will be reviewing the options that have an effect on all the components of OpenOffice.org.

Font Substitution

Font Substitution is handy because when working in an environment where there are many operating systems, there's also a chance that there are many different fonts to work with.

Once at the Font Replacement setting dialog, tick Apply Replacement Table. Under the Change column, for example, change “Times New Roman” to “Times” (former on Windows, but latter exists on Linux). You now have the option of selecting Always or Screen only – Always affects the print-out as well.

AutoSave

Under Save, tick “AutoSave every” and enter some time in minutes. You have the option of always creating a backup copy, or even prompting if you should save (where a pop-up will appear at a stated time).

Under “Always save as” you have the option of saving files (by default) as a Microsoft Office based file. This can help forgetful staff, as document exchange with others sometimes needs to be in RTF's or something Microsoft related.

Undos & Memory Use

Number of undo steps is set at 20 by default – can be increased if need be

Tweaking the caches if you have the ability can improve performance of the software.

Exercise: Cut & Paste in Linux

Surf the Internet, or open up your e-mail and copy your text from the web-browser into OpenOffice.org. This can differ, sometimes requiring an intermediary application depending on the window manager you are running.

Keep in mind that regular cut & paste exists, and the keyboard short-cuts you're familiar with (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V) are similar.

Another thing you've learnt is that some toolbar items have a little triangle near them – this means there are other pull-down options. One example is the Paste toolbar item, which allows you to pull-down and get Paste Special options.

The Toolbars & an Exercise

Don't want to view an icon? Right-click it, click Visible Buttons, and un-tick the icon, that you don't wish to see on the function bar.

Task: Place the Save As button on the function bar, next to the Save icon. Follow the instructions above.

An alternative method of solving the task is to right-click on the function bar, and select Customize.

The Status Bar & an Exercise

Looking at the bottom, it shows you relevant information and status about the current open document. You can add more useful items, depending on what you think is relevant.

Tip: If the OOo window isn't fully maximized, you may not be able to garner the full use of the Status Bar.

Task: Add the current time to the Status Bar.

The Document Converter allows for batch conversions, which makes transition to OpenOffice.org file formats much simpler.

It should be noted that OpenOffice.org is very compatible with other applications out there – Writer handles MS Word .doc's as well as .rtf's very well; Calc does MS Excel, .csv (comma separated values), dBASE files, and it reads Lotus 1-2-3. Impress works with MS PowerPoint, and Draw can edit Impress files (as well as StarDraw).

OpenOffice.org, using the OASIS XML format, means it's 100% compatible with StarOffice file formats as well.

OpenOffice.org also supports other XML-based file formats and can export to several formats that are suitable for PDA's. Tools -> XML Filter Settings for more on this.

Printing to PDF's require the Ghostscript drivers, which most Linux systems come with. This is also standard with Mac OS X (available via the fink package – apt-get install ghostscript), however Windows users will need to get a freeware package like PDF Creator, or purchase the Adobe Distiller.

The Properties option allows the changing of paper size (defaults to Letter, most outside the USA will prefer it to be A4), permanent page orientation, printer resolution, and even font replacement.

The “spadmin” utility runs alongside an already configured printer – so, it is expected that you utilise something like CUPS to configure your printer. Each distribution of Linux comes with its own way of doing it; the Red Hat printtool is available on most distributions and is very friendly.

Exercise

Add a new printer, and configure it for OpenOffice.org usage.

Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) documents are a handy way of distributing documents that you do not want edited. They also look professional, as they keep their form – they are font independent (on the system), so documents always look crisp and clear.

Printing to PDF's is allowed as well, instead of using the Export options that OpenOffice.org has built-in. This as stated earlier, is done with the help of Ghostscript.

File -> Print, and with the name of the printer, set it to “PDF Converter”. A file is then created in your home directory.

Why would you do this? Because you have more control – in terms of presentations, you are able to print slides & notes, or just notes only, something you can't do with the regular export (which will just print slides).

What if the “PDF Converter” is not a selectable printer? Add it! Instead of adding a new printer, choose the option that says “Connect a PDF converter”, and follow the on-screen instructions.

Colin Charles

2003-11-11T13:34:27

Colin Charles