Discovering OpenOffice.org

How to Assign Special Characters in OOo [How-to Guide]

stephanie — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 23:11:34 +0000

Often we need to use special characters that don’t appear on our keyboard. For example, my keyboard doesn’t have the pound sign (the one used for currency in the UK – £).

Fortunately there has been a guide published which will allow you to see various methods for inserting these special characters in OpenOffice.org.

So now you can insert all the ¥, ¤, ±, µ you want, using your preferred method of using macro, menus, autocorrect or key combinations.

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OpenOffice.org in the Cloud – Access your Open Office from anywhere in a browser

stephanie — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:41:36 +0000

There has been some speculation as to whether Oracle will release a web-based version of the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, however two companies have gone ahead and developed solutions for using OpenOffice.org through a web browser.

OpenOffice Anywhere is charged at US$0.65 per hour, with 15 free minutes as a trial.

Ulteo has 1Gb of free storage for your documents, and requires the Sun JVM to work.

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OpenDisc gives you OpenOffice.org and many other programs on one disc – free!

stephanie — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:21:21 +0000

I’m always on the hunt for good open source resources, and OpenDisc is a fantastic one. Basically it’s a site where you can download an ISO disc image and burn it on a CD. It is aimed largely at the education market – students and teachers on a budget, however anyone can download their disc images, and burn a CD.

Note that it supports Windows only.

You do get a lot in the download, with many programs available for installation (you do not have to install them all). If you are more interested in having OOo on a thumb drive / memory stick (USB drive), then try the portable OpenOffice.org page.

Applications included with this ISO image at the time of this post are as follows:

Design – Blender, Dia, The Gimp, Inkscape, Nvu, Scribus, Tuxpaint.
Games – The Battle for Wesnoth, Enigma, Neverball, Sokoban YASC.
Internet – Azureus, Firefox, HTTrack, Pidgin, FileZilla, RSSOwl, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, TightVNC, WinSCP.
Multimedia – Audacity, Celestia, Really Slick Screensavers, Stellarium, Sumatra PDF, VLC media player.
Productivity – GnuCash, MoinMoin, Notepad2, OpenOffice.org, PDFCreator.
Utilities – 7-Zip, Abakt, Clamwin, GTK+, HealthMonitor, TrueCrypt, Workrave.

What a fantastic resource!

Get the ISO file at this link, and visit the OpenDisc homepage for updates.

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OpenOffice.org is Free – BEWARE of sites that sell it to you!

stephanie — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 01:53:12 +0000

I recently saw the post below on Twitter:

BEWARE – OpenOffice.org is free and you can get it from http://www.openoffice.org

Do not let people con you into paying for it!

– END OF PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

No related posts.

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5 ways to use OpenOffice.org for Students [Research, Study & Student Life]

stephanie — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:00:27 +0000

One of the cool things about OOo is that it is a free, full-featured office productivity software that can be used across multiple platforms. This is really appealing for students, who are often on a limited budget.

The following is a list of ways that students can use OpenOffice.org for their daily lives.

#1 – Assignments and Research Papers

This is probably the most obvious. OOo Writer is a word processor that will meet most student needs in this regard, and there are a lot of resources out there to assist students with this.

Gabriel Gurly has put together a tutorial on how to Create and Format a Research Paper using OpenOffice.org 3
I have also added to this with a free Report & Essay template
This MLA Formatted paper was designed for people who use MLA formatting in school
This template pack has a number of different report and presentation templates, in addition to other useful templates to assist you in submitting quality papers and presentations

#2 – Time Management

There are many templates that you can use to plan out your days and weeks – if you are not into digital appointment books, then this might be an ideal solution for you, as sometimes it’s just a good idea to have a calendar or planner up where you can see it.

See the large variety on the OpenOffice.org Templates website
You can even get calendars that have public holidays for your country – here is a calendar with Malaysian Public Holidays, and here is a calendar with Singapore public holidays, for example.
In some cases, you may want weekly planners, that allow you to see each hour in your week at a glance

#3 – Examination Preparation

If you need to prepare for your upcoming examinations, OOo can be used to assist you in finding a suitable way for you to approach revision.

OpenCards is a free OpenOffice.org extension that works with Impress to create flashcards on your computer
You can use OOo Draw to create Mind Maps of each chapter of the materials that you need to cover for examination preparation
Of course, there is always the traditional way of using Writer to summarise notes for each chapter or topic

#4 – Budgeting & Finance

Students have limited finances and often keeping track of that can be a pain. You can use some budgeting or financial spreadsheets to assist you in getting through the week or month.

Vortex Inc has a Money Management template for OpenOffice.org Calc and a personal Budget Template
You can try this free Home Budget worksheet which works in both Calc and Excel (don’t forget to allow macros to work, in order for you to use this spreadsheet).

#5 – Getting a Job

Whether it be a part time job while you’re studying, or applying for jobs after college, OpenOffice.org can assist.

Need assistance in creating a cover letter for job applications – this template pack has a number of professional and personal layouts that will be suitable for putting the cover page to go with your job application so that you can put your best foot forward!
The Powerful Sample Resume Formats site has a number of resume and cover letter formats and lots of useful information, unfortunately some of their templates have broken links. A friend of mine particularly liked one format and sought my help to transform it into an OpenOffice.org Cover Page Template. Visit their site, however, for loads of information.
You will also need a resume, which outlines your skills accumulated to date. The following are some links to resume templates and guides:

As a student, you may not be familiar with resume contents, so please visit this resume layout PDF with instructions, and the about.com Jobsearch website for information on how to complete resumes and cover letters for recent graduates that may not have as much experience.

And Good Luck!

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Cover Letter Template for OpenOffice.org Writer

stephanie — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 05:41:06 +0000

This is just a short post as this was an adaptation from a cover letter on the Powerful Sample Resume Formats website.

Unfortunately the doc version was not able to be downloaded due to a broken link, so I have quickly converted this to an OOo Writer document for use by a friend. I hope you achieve some benefit from this, and please visit the site above as they have very useful information in resume content and layout.

Download

To download the file, you will need to be a registered member of this site. It’s free, and other than the occasional email (less than once a month), you won’t be harrassed by me! If you cannot see the links below, please log in!

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Video Tutorial: Creating a Book Layout in OOo Writer Using Page Styles

stephanie — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 05:55:35 +0000

This is my first attempt at a video tutorial that will show you how to create a basic book layout using Page Styles. Any positive suggestions for improvements are appreciated – please contribute in the comments section.

A template is available for download – see the information below.

Download

To download the file, you will need to be a registered member of this site, due to spammers and the like stealing my bandwidth. It’s free, and other than the occasional email (less than once a month), you won’t be harrassed by me! If you cannot see the links below, please log in!

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FAQ: How to sort lists in OpenOffice.org Calc

stephanie — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:04:14 +0000

I addressed sorting in OpenOffice Writer in a previous post, and have since had a request for a tutorial on sorting in Calc, so here it goes.

Step 1

Select the entire data range that you want to sort. This includes all the columns that have data that need to be kept in line with the column that you want to sort.

Include the headers of the column as well, as OpenOffice will pick these up as column headings automatically (we’ll see this in the next step).

In the example below, I’ve selected the Vegetables, Quantity and Price columns, including the headings.

Step 2

From the menu, select Data > Sort.

Step 3

You will then be presented with the Sort Box below.

Can you see how the ‘Sort By’ column has picked up the column headings? This makes it easier to select the values that we want to sort by.

Select the name of the column that you want to sort by, then select either Ascending (A-Z,0-9) or Descending (Z-A,9-0).

Then click on OK.

In the example above, I sorted by Vegetable, but I could have equally have sorted by price or quantity.

I hope this answers your question, AC.

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Hey Students! Need a free report and essay template? [Free download]

stephanie — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 06:16:53 +0000

One of the cool things about OpenOffice is that it is a free, full-featured office productivity software, and this can be really appealing for students, who are often on a limited budget.

Report / Essay template for student assignments

Sometimes it can be difficult to know where to start when putting together a report or essay, so I have put together this template to assist students in getting started on writing. This should hopefully allow you to focus on the writing, and not on the formatting.

Download

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Alternative for Find and Replace in Writer – replace paragraph marks, and much, much more!

stephanie — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 04:05:29 +0000

Thanks to Solveig Haugland, who has posted about this Fantastic OpenOffice.org Writer extension for searching and replacing carriage returns (two in a row, etc.) with regular expressions, plus much much more.

I’ve installed it, and my days of copying chunks of text to my text editor to do this is over. (I used to cut and paste to text editor as it was faster and easier for me than the regular expressions route as I don’t use regular expressions often and had to keep looking them up).

I suggest you head over to Solveig’s most excellent website to grab a link to the extension, as well as a brief how-to on using it.

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