Slashdot Mirror
Free OpenOffice.org Training Videos
Rollie Hawk writes "Having trouble converting your family and office mates into OpenOffice devotees? NewsForge (Owned by the same people that bring you Slashdot) can now help you convince the visual learners around you that they can do it. NewsForge is releasing a series of free video segments that demonstrate OpenOffice in action from installation to day-to-day use. According to the site, these clips will play on any browser on any operating system as long as Flash is available. One practical topic that should be particularly interesting to the would-be business converts is 'making a slide presentation in a hurry.'"
Open up OO.o 2 and go to:
-Tools.
-Options
-Java
Disable Java, and it will open about twice as fast. I hear it disables macros or something that most users will never use. Hopefully in 2.1 they'll disable Java by default, and load it up slowly in the background after the application is open and being used.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Acrobat Reader loads in a flash for me. It just takes a bit of Liposuction (Plug-in requirements slightly different for Acrobat7, but not by much).
probably this vnc to swf recorder:
http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/
Surfing the net and other cliches...
(Who Meta-Meta-Moderates the Meta-Moderators?)
There are several screen capture to SWF generators:
1) Captivate.
2) Viewletbuilder.
3) Wink.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
But...you're only looking at *some* videos from a CD that accompanies a book, Point & Click OpenOffice.org, that'll be in bookstores by mid-December. You only saw an excerpt of the complete work, which goes into lots more depth than what you've seen. Plus I'll be making and posting more videos soon. Email me (robin at roblimo dot com) with your suggestions. I'll (obviously) start with the ones for which I get the most requests.
:)
Format choice side note: Like it or not, Flash offers the most bandwidth-efficient way to reach the most computer users, on the most platforms. Those who want to redistribute these videos in other file formats are welcome to do so as long as they preserve attribution and all that (Creative Commons License), although I'd suggest emailing me to get AVI or MPEG copies instead of trying to retrack the compressed Flash versions. This will give a better end result.
I'd also like to point out that these videos are primarily for Windows users, not for the slick Linux crowd that reads Slashdot, which is why they're relaxed and kind of fumbly (so they don't intimidate people who aren't comfortable with computers). This also explains the eMachine box. I needed something with Windows and it was on sale cheap. My "real" computers run Linux, just as you'd expect.
- Robin