A lot of people think that most word-processing applications like Writer and its competition, are just like typewriters, with basic formatting like bold and underlining. This is OK for starting the document, but if it’s something that may require a format change in the future, then it could be a long and painful process.

Fortunately, [...]

Living in a metric society, it is much more convenient to have OpenOffice talking to me in metric measurements, rather than in empirical measurements.

So I had fiddled with locals and other such measurements, however this did not seem to change the values presented when I clicked on Format –> Page.

To do this, I followed the [...]

I had to play media from an Impress Presentation today, and was hoping to work from my Ubuntu laptop, however ran into a few hiccups along the way. Here are some notes from my experience – I hope that anyone that comes across this (a) finds it useful and (b) if they have anything to [...]

There are loads of calendar templates that are US-centric, so I decided to do one for Singapore for 2009.

It’s not strictly a template (it is in ODS format), however I hope that you find it useful.

All the holidays are based on the Ministry of Manpower published holidays for 2009.

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If you are looking to enable document collaboration with check-in and check-out of resources and being able to do so from within the Open Office application, then check out O3 Spaces.

This is some reading that I found recently that makes it easier for OpenOffice and Word to exchange files a little more seamlessly. This has become more important as I am consulting in an environment that is a strict MS user – and being able to have documents that open seamlessly in the MS Word [...]

Yes there is and it can be applied in most of the OpenOffice applications. I am demonstrating it in Writer below, however the same steps are applied to cells in Calc.

1. Highlight the area from which you wish to copy the format from.

2. Click on the format painter icon in the toolbar.

3. When the mouse [...]

There are a number of good how-to guides out there which detail explicit instructions and information on how to create different projects in OpenOffice.

I include a list of some of them here:

How to Write a Thesis in OpenOffice [PDF]
This is not only good for a thesis, but for any general writing (especially for academic [...]