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 minute, with 15 free minutes as a trial.
Ulteo has 1Gb of free storage for your documents, and requires the Sun JVM to work.
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:
What a fantastic resource!
Get the ISO file at this link, and visit the OpenDisc homepage for updates.
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 
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whether it be a part time job while you’re studying, or applying for jobs after college, OpenOffice.org can assist.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
From the menu, select Data > Sort.
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.
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.
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!
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.
When putting lists together, sometimes we don’t put them in alphabetical or numerical order. Fortunately OpenOffice Writer can help us sort them into order automatically – and relatively easily.
You may have a list that needs sorting - it can be plain text or in bullets, or even within a table
Step 1: Highlight all the text that is to be sorted.
If that text is in a table, highlight the table (it will sort the rows automatically).
Step 2: Select Tools > Sort.
Select Tools > Sort from the menu
Step 3: In the Sort box, select the order by which you want to sort. If you are sorting a table, then Key 1 will be the first condition that will be used to sort, and you can specify the column, Key 2 will be the 2nd condition, etc. For lists, this doesn’t apply.
You will also decide if you want the order to be Ascending (A->Z), or Descending (Z->A) in this box.
Select the sort order and how it is to be sorted
Step 4: Click OK, and your list will be sorted.
And the list is sorted
Update: Now available – FAQ: How to sort lists in OpenOffice Calc, and as a PDF document on Scribd – check out Sorting in OpenOffice Writer and Calc.
My name is Stephanie Krishnan and I'm passionate about the way that open source software and its community can help small businesses and individuals with their productivity and lives. One of the biggest arguments I get from business owners, however, is lack of support options. I decided to put together my own support blog to help people be productive at various levels with one of my favourite open source alternatives: OpenOffice! I do this through tutorials, downloadable templates and answers to questions from readers!
