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, over at World Label, they’ve put together some basic information on formatting using Styles – for both Calc and Writer.
Check it out at:
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 add/amend, please post it in the comments.
Inserting Media – Menu Items
I tried to Insert –> Object –> Video about 50 times without success before I hit the subject forums and learned that in OpenOffice 3.0 that you need to Insert –> Movie and Sound. Yay! It worked! Movie media inserted!
Formats
In Windows with OpenOffice Impress, both avi and mpg worked OK for me.
In Ubuntu, however, I found the avi file repeated the movie playing side-by-side (like there was 1.5 instances of the movie playing next to each other simultaneously). This occurred in the player I was using as well as OpenOffice, so I’m not sure that it was an Impress problem. I abandoned my Ubuntu laptop and drove to the office to get my Windows laptop – I’ll let you know if this is something that I can fix. At this stage, my thoughts are that I will need to convert avi to mpg in order to play within a slide in Impress on Ubuntu.
Settings
One thing that was immediately obvious when I inserted the movie media was how do I get the movie to scale to the whole screen? The first few times I tried to play, the movie played in a little square in the middle of a big black frame, even though I had dragged and expanded the object to fit the entire slide.
I then tried to right mouse button click a few times and explored all the options in the context menu, and then I noticed this extra toolbar at the bottom of the screen
Media Playback Toolbar
This toolbar had a few key options which controls what happens to the media when the presentation arrives at this slide.
(1) Determines what the media will do when the slide is first shown. Will it stop (default, i think), play, pause or loop?
(2) At what position will it commence playing? You don’t have to start play from the beginning of the media! Very cool option!
(3) Sound (volume and mute)
(4) Size – do you want it 50% of the original size, 100% of the original size, 200% of the original size or scaled to fit the whole screen?
I hope you are able to get your presentations up and running with minimum difficulty. I don’t know that doing this was hard – it was simply a matter of knowing where the controls are – figuring them out was pretty intuitive. Ubuntu is a little behind in their media playing capability, so I’m not sure if no avi playback is strictly a ‘bug’ as yet. Good luck to you all and hope your presentations are a hit!
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.
Download the OpenOffice Calc Calendar Template (Singapore 2009)
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 applications is probably the trickiest aspect of being an OpenOffice user.
It suggests that you tweak a number of default options with regards to saving and use of VBA, as well as other compatibility settings. I hope that it assists with some of your issues.
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 looks like a paint bucket, highlight the text to which you want to apply the format.
4. Let the mouse button go and the format will be applied to that section of text.
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:
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.org! I do this through tutorials, downloadable templates and answers to questions from readers!
