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Special Edition Using Star Office 6.0
First, PC makers rarely have financial inducements to preinstall open source applications, especially when it eats into their upsell margins. Second, people have a misconception that documents produced in MS Office can only be read by MS Office (a fact which leads Richard Stallman to call for an end to all Microsoft Word attachments ). Third, subsidized prices and the wide availability of instructional material ensure that teachers use these commercial products for class and give assignments requiring them. Finally, consumers switching to an open source product need confidence that the open source application has equivalent functionality and adequate documentation to reduce the learning curve.
Fortunately, a first-class user guide on OpenOffice.org/StarOffice has been written, and that book is Michael Koch's Special Edition Using StarOffice 6.0. This book, actually a second edition, covers the new version and gives fuller treatment to StarOffice writer and the HTML editor. Despite the use of "StarOffice" in the title, this book actually covers both StarOffice and OpenOffice.org in depth.
An an aside, let me compliment Que editions for the legibility and usability of layout. (Que also produced the excellent Ed Bott's Special Edition Using Microsoft Office XP). Nice readable texts, lots of boxes, tips and cautions. Every chapter finishes with a helpful troubleshooting section.
Two immediate reactions: 1) Gosh, I didn't know OpenOffice/StarOffice could do all that! I was pleasantly surprised, for example, to learn the number of graphic capabilities the program has. 2) This book covers functionality in considerable depth, with enough content to satisfy the newbie as well as the advanced user. In addition to documenting the office software, the book also includes reference sections on StarOffice Basic, using data sources, building forms and macros. It also includes a chapter on Adabas, the database that comes as part of the StarOffice package (but not with OpenOffice.org).
Koch benefits from the fact that users already start with a good conceptual framework of what MS Office products are supposed to do. The biggest conceptual challenge in moving from MS Office to Star/OpenOffice is getting used to the idea of applying styles to text instead of just clicking on an icon for formatting. MS Office actually has terrific styling capabilities (and a usable interface for managing styles),but Microsoft's friendly GUI discourages users from thinking about document structure. Contrast that to OpenOffice.org, which nudges the user more firmly towards styles. Managing the different layers of styles in OpenOffice.org can be tricky and confusing, so Koch spends a considerable amount of time and space on that. Another chapter on sharing and exchanging information with MS Office users goes into exquisite detail about compatibility and formatting losses when converting documents, as well as the StarOffice XML file format.
Cordelia of Buffy the Vampire Slayer once said, "There are books about computers? Isn't that the point of computers, to replace books?" Perhaps I am just cheap, but when evaluating a user guide, I often ask whether the online help isn't good enough. Or whether newgroups/websites/forums are adequate. Or whether the user interface is intuitive or allows you to discover a solution by just playing around. Dozens of heavy thousand-page books clutter my apartment, leading me to wonder whether the convenience of a gigantic dead-tree reference guide outweighs the increase in clutter. Every time I move to another apartment, I keep lugging those gigantic SQL and C++ books I haven't consulted for years, but feel compelled to keep around. (Contrast that with the very portable and handy Oreilly's Linux Server Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools, (reviewed on Slashdot), which covers most sysadmin tasks AND can be stashed in a backpack without causing whiplash).
For the last two months (in which I used OpenOffice.org thoroughly), I performed a little experiment. Where was the best place to find answers to my OpenOffice.org questions? I tried consulting the online help, then the book, then the newsgroups and openoffice websites. Here are the results:
- Adding page numbers. The book had the best information, though what do you look under in the index? I eventually found it under "Numbers, Writer" (?!). Online help was useless. (The answer is to insert a footer and then insert a page number field in the footer).
- I just created a hyperlink in the HTML editor. But the underlined style is bleeding to the text after the link. How do I stop that? Neither the book nor online help provided the answer, although the newsgroup did after 24 hours. (The answer is to press the End key or to select Format >> Default)
- How do I create an HTML style with the stylist which specifies the background color of a table cell? (No answer from anywhere, although Koch admits that that the StarOffice HTML editor is "temperamental").
- While drawing a flowchart on the Draw program, how do I save the entire image as a jpeg and not just the highlighted part? (By grouping the components together, the book helpfully advises. The online help offers nothing).
- On a spreadsheet, what is the keyboard shortcut for bringing the cursor back to the left column? (Keyboard shortcuts are easy to find in the book. Couldn't find it in the online help).
Generally, the book had the most reliable and in-depth information. That was especially helpful when trying to perform a complex action (like creating a table of contents). But the majority of my inquiries had to do with using the interface, not functionality. Often the sheer size of the book made daunting the simple task of finding a function on a dialog or a keyboard shortcut.
That is the paradox of super-sized application manuals. Surely one doesn't read them from cover to cover. But after an application reaches a certain level of complexity, the software interface is no longer intuitive, and you pretty much need a book just to find things in the interface. As one who does technical writing, it may sound funny to say, but often my favorite thing about these super-size manuals are the screenshots. I can't tell you how many times I've browsed through a book and come across a dialog box I never knew existed. On the other hand, when application manuals reach a certain size, navigating through "book interfaces" becomes almost as difficult as navigating through the software interface or help system.
Online help is good when you know what you're looking for (i.e., when you have a specific search term to look for). Books are good when you don't know what you're looking for. With books, the reader can flip through pages in the general vicinity of a topic and randomly stumble upon the right information. Books allow the user to bypass the outlined hierarchy of online help and learn the appropriate terminology for describing the task (which then makes it easier to find things in the online help).
A recent visit to a technical bookstore and a large chain bookstores showed no books on the shelf for StarOffice, but dozens of books on Microsoft Office, That is too bad, because Using StarOffice 6.0 provides much-needed in-depth coverage on an application whose user base will grow as tight budgets cause companies and public sector agencies to examine open source alternatives.
* PDF conversion (as well as docbook and Flash) export are available on the OpenOffice.org 1.1 Beta 2 build.
Other OpenOffice.org Resources:
Kaaredyret has the best English language OpenOffice links page . ooodocs.org has a lively Forum for OO users. Or if you want, you can look at a PDF of the official Staroffice Documentation (400 pages)
ROBERT NAGLE (aka idiotprogrammer )is a technical writer, trainer who doesn't think that open source documentation sucks . He works for Texas Instruments in Houston, Texas. You can purchase the Special Edition Using StarOffice 6.0 from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I've been using exclusively OO.o for a number of months. I recently installed MS Office 2003 b2 and took it for a run, and while tight and very modern, it's full of many crazy features and the XML is writes is hopelessly unreadable.
Most people take open source apps for granted, but this is one app that is DEFINITELY worth your cash. Ifd you really want to be part of a free software community, buy StarOffice 6 from Sun.
I've been doing PDF conversion from Word without Acrobat for ages. Its very simple:
.prn by default, but rename it to .ps if you like.. its just postscript. Then run it through ps2pdf (available on cygwin, I believe), part of the Ghostscript package. Bingo, you have your brand-spankin new PDF.
Add a new printer that uses postscript, and have it use the "FILE:" port. That way whenever you print to it, it will print to a file in postscript. Windows will name it
Yes, it does lack some of the more advanced PDF features, such as clickable table of contents, or fill-in forms.. but it gets you a viewable PDF.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
I have had to educate some on why we don't take them anymore. Here's the mail I sent out:
As we use many different programs to layout, archive, and read files, we require file formats that do not depend on any one program.
Please send all documents saved as .RTF (rich text format). This is an open standard, and one that all word processors can read. It also saves to a smaller file size, and is better for archiving as it contains no proprietary code.
In MS Word, Your .DOC files can be saved as .RTF as follows.
1. Open your document
2. Go to the 'File' menu
3. Select 'Save As'
4. In the dialog box, type a new name for your document if desired, then in the 'Save As Type' drop down menu, choose '.RTF Rich Text Format'.
5. Click 'Save'
6. You're done!
You may also click the 'Options' button in the 'Save As' dialog box and choose '.RTF Rich Text Format' for the drop down menu "Save Word files as". This reminds you to save them as .RTF files.
In other word processors and page layout programs, you may be able to 'Export' your open file as .RTF.
So far, no complaints. I hold the cards in this situation (do it this way or no publishing), and the computer stuff is completely up to me, so YMMV.
It does feel good to kill the .doc files one by one, and if my explanation has a little FUD in it, oh well.
I learned alot from MS.
I'll start by saying that MS Office is just plain easier to use than anything anyone else has to offer, IMHO.
But that's not to say that it has to be that way. The majority of today's workforce wasn't raised on computer technology. We shouldn't rush to overthrow the tried-and-true in today's corporate market. Open source, Linux, etc., should be implemented in the schools. Today's students will grow up having the means with which to understand the open-sorce movement and perhaps grow it to be a true option in their workforce of tomorrow.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
Open. The standard.
Cheers,
Ian
I was interested to read this article as I thought I would have a quick browse of Slashdot while taking a break from writing a huge system design document, which for the first time I am attemption to do in Open Office on Linux rather than Microsoft office. My observations are as follows;
The different components have different strengths. I rate Star / Open Office Writer very highly, it does allow you to structure documents well and it's support for tables is excellent, one of the few areas where it betters Microsoft office.
The Excel replacement I don't think is nearly as mature. I generally use it to open other peoples Excel docuemnts on my Linux box and for this it works very well. However, when it comes to usability features for display, such as ease of splitting into panes, adding autosort or even easily hiding rows or columns it doesn't compare. All the advanced features, such as pivot tables, work much better in Excel.
Presenter and Draw are a mixed bag. I find Presenter now opens most powerpoint documents well enough to read on LInux but authoring is a different story. I tried to use draw this morning to produce a simple flowchart and it simply wasn't very intuative, doing tasks which are simple in Powerpoint such as adding text inside a shape wern't easy. Powerpoint (and all of MS office, for that matter) is very good at presenting the correct context sensative menu options when you right click on something, Star Office has some way to go in this regard.
However, my biggest problem with Star Office on Linux is font support. It simply dosen't seem to interface nicely with the other fonts installed on my Linux box, and reading all the documentation and newsgroups has helped, but it is still a chore. This is particularly apparent when converting Word or Powerpoint documents, quite frequently it will replace fairly common characters like full stops (periods) or quotes with a question mark, often making the supplied document unreadable. I find it strange that some very sophisticated conversion filters for graphics and embedded objects work well but these fail, if anyone could tell me if the book addresses these issues I would be interested to know. I have always found saving OO documents to Microsoft formats to work well.
So, in summary I am going to use OO on Linux as my primary document editor, which just leaves Windows for the occasional Powerpoint, and this book seems like a useful purchase to help with this.
I recently provided a service to my clients using the 1.1 OpenOffice Beta and the SDK. They have a custom php/mysql document management system, and I automatically index all doc,xls,ppt, and pdf files for them. This way, they can search through the contents of their "attachments" quite easily.
The way it works is that OpenOffice can run as a server and listen on a port. There are many examples of document conversion given in the SDK, so that you can essentially use OpenOffice as a Web Services platform. When the document is added into their document management system, I run an external process that converts the documents to pdf, then to text, and then imports them into the MySQL database.
It's pretty darn sweet! The conversion works incredibly well for the purposes of getting the text content out of the various formats.
As a side note, I've been using it for my personal use for quite a while. The filters are absolutely outstanding for working with and using Microsoft file formats. I have incredibly complex documents, and it opens them quite well. The PDF conversion is excellent and is really nice to have. Check out the 1.1 Beta, as it's been really stable in my experience.
Get OpenOffice.org 1.1 Beta. The filters have *vastly* improved. There are many features added as well. Don't bother with StarOffice unless you really need comercial support (questions are probbly answered faster on the forums) or the clipart (which you can get elseware anyway). The database app thats distributed sucks, so I won't even count that.
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
If you're intrepid enough to compile the sucker (takes over a day) you'll find the icons are simply windows .bmp formatted files that you can replace with whatever you want. This results in the creation of an alternate set of .res files that you can then drop into any OOo distribution. This is the approach that Ximian uses to bundle a different icon set into their 'enhanced' OpenOffice.org included with Ximian Desktop.
It is also possible to use completely alternative widget sets with OOo, as illustrated by the NeoOffice port using Cocoa widgets and Carbon-rendered widgets (screenshots of Neo vs. Office v.X). This approach, however, is still only available to GPL versions of OOo.
If you've got better ideas as to how to achieve cross-platform compatibility and skinning while maintaining the identical look and feel requirement Sun has, stop by the Graphics System Layer project and lend a hand!
And if you're an intrepid graphics designer (who knows a few other intrepid graphics designers...) and would like to make an alternative icon set for the approximately 1000 icons, please pipe up and help us out! Parts of our icon set are the direct result of the truism that programmers are definitely not graphics artists, and others are relics from when Star Division was busy mimicing Win95/Office97. Our community development can only provide the features the community wants if folks volunteer, else OpenOffice.org will continue to gain only the features Sun believes are needed for selling StarOffice, not necessarily those wanted by the user base of its free cousin.