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OpenOffice.org Resource Kit
With a stable 1.0 release and spectacular cross-platform functionality, it's finally time to seriously consider putting this software to work in your company. Whether you are completely new to OpenOffice.org or just moving from its predecessor StarOffice, you'll want to take a look at OpenOffice.org 1.0 Resource Kit from Prentice Hall PTR.
The "kit" consists of a well written tutorial book and a companion CD-ROM. The book's authors (Solveig Haughland and Floyd Jones) are salty veterans in the technical training field, and it shows in the quality of the text. The CD contains the OpenOffice.org release itself, as one might expect. It provides builds for every supported platform, to include the Mac OS X developer alpha version. At the time this review was written, two minor upgrades have been made available since my book's CD-ROM was pressed. These are, naturally, available for free via the OpenOffice.org web-site. In addition to the releases, the CD includes templates, macros, and examples from the developer community. The authors provide additional templates and resources at http://www.getopenoffice.org
The first five chapters of the book are devoted to basic issues such as installation, migrating existing data, printer issues, and global setup tips. Special guidance is given to users switching over from StarOffice, or even that Redmond company's office suite. Speaking of that company, OpenOffice.org is superb at converting Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files into its own open formats. The book shows how to use the handy "AutoPilot", which can perform batch conversions of your existing data for use with OpenOffice.org's equivalent applications. Originals are kept safely intact-- AutoPilot produces converted copies. This could make a large office transition much easier, if not completely seamless.
The next six chapters cover the creation of written documents in fantastic detail. The organization of this section is quite intuitive; you'll easily learn how to create a simple letter. When you're ready to write your memoirs, you won't need to buy another book--it's all there: complex formatting options, page layout functionality, object manipulation, linking cross-references, and indexing. And don't forget office goodies like mail merges, label printing, and business cards.
Chapters 13-17 focus entirely on web-page development. Serious web designers may find this section bordering on useless, but the casual user will be able to create a home page without learning a single tag of HTML.
The next several chapters deal with Calc (a spreadsheet program), Impress (for creating presentations), and Draw ("the best drawing program you've never used," say the authors). The layout of each section follows the comprehensive example from the earlier chapters detailing OpenOffice.org's word processor, Writer. Basic topics are organized neatly along with the more advanced ones, and neither seem to get in the way of the other. Both the novice and the expert will find very little lacking from this material.
Organizations who deal frequently with databases will not be disappointed with OpenOffice.org, either. The final three chapters of the book explain how to incorporate data from any flavor database you're likely to be using in your network. Throw in an appendix on macros, and you've got one very complete tutorial masquerading as an all-in-one reference. I'm very picky when it comes to my geek shelf space, and this one gets high marks in all the important areas: comprehensive, well organized, and with a great signal-to-noise ratio.
We have learned that superior open source software alone isn't always enough to supplant the existing closed source way of doing things. However, "document it, and they will come!" The OpenOffice.org 1.0 Resource Kit will go a long way toward fulfilling that prophecy.
Reader Marcus Green sent in a review of this book as well. Here are some of his thoughts:
In addition to the document management features the book covers the more "Page Layout" style features of StarOffice such as the ability to manage columns and to place vertical text running up the page. These are features I was not even aware existed in StarOffice before I read this book.The StarOffice companion has over 1030 pages, but it is really bigger than it sounds because it is very dense. Although it has many screen shots, plenty of use is made of text based instructions. Instead of repeating instructions, the text will often point you to the page where a concept was first explained. This does break up the flow of instructions but it also means that the book contains more information than if they had repeated the text every time it was needed.
I found the section on the graphics module useful because I had not realised how StarOffice has some slightly non-standard ways of working with menus and selections. For example I spent quite a bit of time trying to get the 3d shapes menu to pop out and show all the possible shape options. It was only on a closer reading of the text of this book did I appreciate that you need to click and hold down the mouse for a few seconds before the menu pops out.
The tone of the book comes across as being created by people who like the program rather than a creation of a faceless corporation. Thus in the graphics section they have included the amusing Moose with moving fly graphic that is used for the logo of the JavaRanch website. Here is an example of the text style from the section on macros. "Macros can do things like open a file when you do a particular task, process data, or take your grandmothers' credit cards and buy $3000 worth of cat toys." It also features a section titled "Turning Off Annoying Features," which of course is about the autoformatting and word completion.
You can purchase the OpenOffice.org Resource Kit from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Heres all the possible trolls, rolled up into one mod point.
1) OpenOffice is slow
2) No font config support
3) Ugly paper clip clone (the lightbulb)
4) Uses a non standard printer library
5) Won't work on my 386SX running Slackware 1.0
6) I don't wan't to start a holy war here, but my linux box is taking 20 minutes to.....
7) join the GNAA
8) Mirror
9) Openoffice has no footnote support
10) My Mom says linux dosen't have any decent solitare games
11) ???
12) -12, troll.
Are you kidding?
MS Word doesn't import MS Word documents properly...
So we have two choices to what we can do.
I'm not much of a defeatist, so I'm going with option 2.
Besides, it imports simple word docs fine. And really, Word is a word processor, not a page layout program. If you really want to do some fancy stuff neither word nor OOo are good. Go get pagemaker or quark.
i don't like my old sig.
Don't judge OpenOffice besed on 1.0.
http://avi.alkalay.net/software/msfonts/
for a solution. Hint, just get Microsoft fontpack.
One more thing, Microsoft supplies free viewers for Word, Excel and Powerpoint. They even run inside Wine. Google for them. I run OO with Windows 2000 and have these viewers installed, plus the fonts. What can i say? It works.
For instance, the version that was realized around the time of Windows 3.11 did not by default install the filters needed to load Word files from many other versions of word, particularly DOS and Macintosh. Even when the filters were installed, corruption of data was common.
More recently certain versions and installations of Word 2000 seemed to chew up my Word 95 files. Headers went missing, text was garbles, all sorts of stuff.
The reality is that MS is so obsessed in keeping monopoly though the closed and convoluted Word format, that they do not seem to care if inter-version file can be moved perfectly. Likewise, they are so obsessed with all user upgrading with every version, they do not seem feel responsible about full support of older formats.
What we need is a really inclusive formatted text file format. If companies like Sun, IBM, Redhat, and Thinkfree would just get together to come up with something, then there could be a competitive force. RTF just does not seem good enough. At this point MS is no longer selling the tool, but the file format. The competition needs to be on that basis.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
This review, in particular, almost seems like it was copied straight off of Amazon or something. Some of the quotes seem to come from a marketing firm rather than an independent critic:
Whether you are completely new to OpenOffice.org or just moving from its predecessor StarOffice, you'll want to take a look at OpenOffice.org 1.0 Resource Kit from Prentice Hall PTR.
If only there were some sort of meta-moderation for book reviews...
OpenOffice.org Resource Kit Review (Score: -1, Uninformative)
I have spent more years of my life working with Microsoft Word than I care to contemplate at this juncture. I assure you that the problems you're describing are not inherent to porting documents from Word to OO. They're problems which you will see whenever you open a document with a word processing program which is not configured the same as the word processing program which originated the document.
Most people don't notice this problem because most people never bother to change the default Word configurations. If Mary makes a Word document and sends it to Steve, and they're both using Word's defaults, it will look exactly the same when Steve opens it. However, if Mary then sends her Word document to Bob (who has spent many hours configuring Word to his liking) Bob's instance of Word will "translate" Mary's document into Bob's preferred formatting. Or rather, it will attempt to do so, with varying degrees of success.
I have personally had to tackle the problem of importing Word documents into Word more times than you can possibly imagine. I've also had to import Open Office documents into Open Office. The problem isn't that "Word sucks" or "Open Office sucks." The problem is that both programs need to find a way to properly import formatting rules on a per-document basis.
(Of course, that's easy for me to say, isn't it? I'm not the one trying to program it, am I?)