Learning Open Office

• (announcements?)

• (suggestions for future LinuxWorkshops?)

• (welcome, buzzword bingo and fabulous prize)

For a long time, we have been meaning to put together some information about OpenOffice. The purpose of this session is to introduce some of the options for learning how to use OpenOffice. First we will look at some of the learning resources and then we will try out a couple of the tutorials if there is time.

From http://why.openoffice.org/: (go and look) (is any of "Better by design", "Better for you", and "Honest software" important?) (in the easy to use section talk abot "No need to retype". Ask about experiences with documents prepared in Microsoft Word and Excel. also about exchanging documents with collaborators. How many are using OpenOffice? exclusively?)

"OpenOffice.org is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose."

The OpenOffice components are

• Writer word processor
• Calc spreadsheet
• Impress presentation
• Draw graphics
• Base database

The first thing to mention is the Help functionality that is built into the OpenOffice suite components. Help is accessed via the Help menu and also by pressing the F1 key. You should also notice that if you hover your cursor over any of the icons, a "tool tip" will appear that explains the icon's function. If you'd like the tool tips to be a little more verbose, you can turn on "extended" tool tips (Tools...Options...OpenOffice.org...General...Extended Tips check box). (use the drawing bar icon as an example) There is also the "Whats This?" item on the Help menu. It temporarily turns on Extended Tips when a little more explanation is needed, but you don't want it turned on all the time.

I installed OpenOffice using the default repositories for my Kubuntu installation. On my computer, the "Get Help Online..." item in the Help menu links to a site that has help for OpenOffice and the particular Linux installation. This can be helpful if there are features or problems that are specific to the version of Linux that is running.

A great place to start for online resources is http://support.openoffice.org/. It contains links to free community support, commercial support and training, OpenOffice.org books, and general community resources. Of particular interest:

• the Documentation Project - contains templates, help guides, how-Tos, and other useful documentation for users. For example, the user guides section is a very nice collection of documentation on each of the OpenOffice components. Also very helpful are the How To links. It has a nice, clean layout that makes to pretty easy to see what topics are covered.

• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

• here is a big list of tutorials - many are animations, if you like that sort of thing (show OpenOffice.org COSing from neg 10 to pos 10"; this is a Shockwave Flash presentation; I suspect that there is supposed to be audio. Is that possible in a flash movie? It would make the demonstration better.)

• http://www.tutorialsforopenoffice.org/ - step by step tutorials for the basics of OpenOffice (do the Calc, Charting Data example; note that there a number of small differences due to Windows vs Linux)

http://www.digitaldistribution.com/about/lessons/

OpenOffice extensions, macros, and plugins are available at http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/

One interesting extension available here is the Professional Template Pack. It adds about 80 templates for Writer, Calc, Draw and Impress. It also adds many backgrounds that can be used in any presentation.

Caution; possible heresy follows:

Most of us are familiar with the Sweave package for R. It can be used to combine R code with LATEX so that the output of the code is embedded in the processed document. The capabilities of Sweave were later extended to HTML format in the R2HTML? package.

The odfWeave package was created so that the functionality of Sweave can used to generate documents that the end-user can easily edit with OpenOffice? or other software that can process Open Document formatted documents. This is a possible path to use to get sweave output into, say, a Word document.

The CRAN page for odfWeave is http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/odfWeave/index.html. The paper odfWeave and Data Analysis Platforms discusses odfWeave in the context of a data analysis project.

Random info and links

Calc functions use ; rather that , to separate function arguments

Put "=STARCALCTEAM()" in any Calc cell and hit return. See calc development team. Woot! http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Easter_Eggs contains a bunch of other similar stuff.

Here is a discussion of Options in OpenOffice.org Calc

As an aside: While preparing this presentation I found the UNDP-APDIP International Open Source Network site (http://www.iosn.net/). It is a United Nations initiative that has all sorts of information about Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) technologies and applications. There are some basic Linux and OpenOffice tutorials and training material available there. The main interest, however, is the application and promotion of open source software in the developing world.

"Every powerful tool can cause trouble if you misuse it and you have to be more careful with a powerful tool than with a less powerful one: You can do more harm (to yourself or others) with a car than with a bicycle, with a power saw than with a hand saw, etc." - Bjarne Stroustrup (developer of C++)