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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.'"
1. Fire up PowerPoint on Windows PC.
2. Quickly layout presentation using the unparalleled tools of PowerPoint.
3. Run out of office with completed presentation before OS zealots have completed building the bonfire to burn your witch ass.
It doesn't matter how many times I've told her over the phone, how many times we've gone over it in person, how many times she's taken notes... my mom can't remember how to do even the most basic things. Opening and saving she has down... but copy and paste? Double space? Changing the font? Oof! Too difficult!
Hrm... but now that I think of it, she probably won't be able to figure out how to bookmark the site, and even if she does she probably won't remember how to find the bookmark.
Oh well... nevermind...
sig.
If you're having trouble convincing someone to learn a new word processor, you can sometimes convince them using the "shame method".
I tell them that if my 85 year old, blind grandmother could learn to email, then can learn how to use Open Office. Sure she wasn't blind at the time, and was only 77 when she learned to use a computer, but some people just need to hear that someone older and frailer than they are, could do something they've never tried. It worked to convince my grandpa how to use the computer. My grandma learned first, and he got kind of jealous that she knew how to play cribbage on the machine and he didn't, so he put his mind to learning it too.
90% of teaching is convincing the person that they are capable of learning.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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.
They really should make use of tech like YouTube.
Sadly, we escalated the issue to a non-technical boss who decided that it was best to appease the other PHB and just buy MS Office instead. I'm hoping that these vids will make evangelizing the use of OSS easier for me and avoid it happening next time.
Yeah, I learned to be more proactive about educating everyone about OSS.. first demo/train and then install...
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cpu0: Microsoft Clippium ("GenuineClippy" ChromedMetal-Class). Paperbinding, lockpicking, fish-hook-hack support.
Great thing to help users by recording this kind of videos :)
Do anybody knows what program was used to mae thos videos?
Might be some ViewletBuilder opensource/free replacement?
Regards,
Ego
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There are people (like me) who refuse to install Flash (well, at least until GPLFlash is done and does not ruthlessly crash my browser on load any more ;)) on their systems, so an alternative download for (non-interactive, if applicable) MPEG4-encoded, via a free codec like XViD, for example, versions of the files would be highly appreciated, methinks.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
I can't wait to watch these helpful videos! Now could somebody just point me to a free training video explaining how to play a video on Linux? Or if that doesn't exist, maybe somebody's written some documentation in OpenOffice format?
Find free books.
I said it would be like this at the beginning of "The Information Age" (or at least when the public at large first heard of the term): I said that the information age would propegate fiction as easily as truth, and thus computers would not make us smarter as a people. Computers only magnify human intellect, and if that intellect is rotten, the rotteness gets magnified a thousand-fold.
Anonymous cowards -> the line forms to the right.
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