OpenOffice.Org 1.0 Resource Kit [Paperback]

It used to be that the saying "You get what you pay for" ranked up there with suchindisputable truths as, "What goes up must come down," "Water is wet," and "I had torestart Windows today." But since OpenOffice.org is free, "you get what you pay for" isnot only disputable, but down there with "the board of directors said the accountingpractices were OK" and "hey, let's form an Internet startup."

OpenOffice.org, the open source product of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice, is a full-featured,remarkably good office suite. It matches Microsoft Office program for program,and goes a giant step further with a great graphics program, Draw. You get applications forworking with documents, spreadsheets, slide presentations, web sites, graphics, anddatabases--anywhere from Oracle to a simple text file.

Want to do a holiday newsletter as a mail merge, printing out a copy for each of the 135people on your address list? It's really easy. Put together a book? You've got all the toolsyou need. Do complex statistical or mathematical calculations in a spreadsheet? Ditto.Create a Web site start-to-finish (along with graphics, animations, and image maps). Openyour old WordStar files from college and your Lotus 1-2-3 files from your first job. Scrapeyour jaw on the ground when you see how small the file sizes are.

This release of OpenOffice.org also has a bunch of enhancements over StarOffice 5.2.We're satisfied and impressed that the developers incorporated lots of good feedback.

What goes up must come down. Water is wet. OpenOffice.org is free.

(And yes, I really did have to restart Windows today.)

This is the only StarOffice or OpenOffice.org book you can currently get that has the CDalong with it. You get the software for every platform, plus a bunch of extras that theOpenOffice.org community has put together--templates, macros, examples, etc.

Plus you get the Mac OS X Developer version, an alpha build of the software that runs onthe love child of Steve Jobs and a UNIX kernel, the built-with-UNIX Mac operatingsystem.It even boasts an AutoPilot thatconverts directories of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files to OpenOffice.org formats.

OpenOffice.org runs on Windows, Linux, Lindows, and Solaris. The OpenOffice.orggroup is working on versions for Mac OSX, FreeBSD, and other platforms.

This is a book that lets you find what you need quickly and get it done. This isn't a bookfor "dummies", with epic-length procedures for cutting and pasting. On the other hand, wedon't include extensive details on those sexy technical issues like mime types and LDAPWe wrote the book that we would want: all the important stuff, but nothing too basic ortechnically impractical for the intermediate user (and with a little humor along the way).We also talked to hundreds of new StarOffice and OpenOffice.org users, so we were ableto document what people really need to do.

If you're like most intermediate users, you already know enough to be dangerous, whichmeans you'll probably just dive in and try to do things in OpenOffice.org without anyhelp. Sometimes that strategy works, other times it doesn't. If it doesn't, read the relevantsections in this book.

For instance, one of the most frequently asked questions is "How do I print spreadsheetheadings on every page?" The answer has been in this book all along. Go read RepeatingSpreadsheet Headings (Rows or Columns) on Each Page on page 626.

We also indexed the living daylights out of this book, so use the Index, too.

You can get more info on OpenOffice.org in Chapter 1, Introduction to OpenOffice.org1.0, on page 3.

Go through Chapter 5, Setup and Tips, on page 95. It gives you an overview of the workenvironment and shows you lots of really useful tips that affect the whole program.

Use the Quick Start tutorials. We've included something for those of you who like toplunge in quickly and get your hands dirty.

Don't panic!