OpenOffice.org For Dummies

by Gurdy Leete, Ellen Finkelstein, Mary Leete

Uses the straightforward For Dummies style to show Linux and Windows users how to use the OpenOffice.org desktop productivity suiteOpenOffice.org has a user interface and feature set similar to that of other office suites and works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft OfficeExplains how to download, install, and set up both the Linux and Windows versions of OpenOffice.orgOrganized by the four key desktop applications provided in the OpenOffice.org suite: Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), and Draw (graphics)Other topics covered include creating and formatting documents with Writer, using templates and styles, creating spreadsheets with Calc, manipulating spreadsheet data, creating a presentation with Impress, and creating and editing images with Draw

Genres: Computers

384 pages, Paperback

First published December 10, 2003

Reviews

[Daniel]

The book is a thorough introduction to OpenOffice.org, as things stood way back in the early 2000s when the book was written. As with all computer manuals, reading it is something of a character-building exercise. You're glad you did when you finish, but getting there is some work. At least the authors write well, and I only found two typos in the whole thing, which is exceptional for a work of this length and genre.

A very few parts haven't aged well, such as the retroactively humorous claim that OpenOffice.org has the full backing of Sun Microsystems, a "multibillion-dollar international corporation." Even at the time of the book's writing, Sun was strugging to overcome the beating it took in the dot-com crash. And just six years after the publication date, Oracle bought Sun and the new ownership took a dimmer view of open-source projects. Fortunately, OpenOffice.org evolved into Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice, the latter of which seems to have attracted the lion's share of developers and support. Who knows, it might even stick around longer than the typical "multibillion-dollar international corporation."

I can also happily report that installing LibreOffice on Windows 10 is pretty simple now. You just download one .msi (Microsoft Installer) file and execute it. The installation procedures in the book are a little more complicated, reflecting a not-so-simple bygone era when we had to decompress our own archive files and walk ten miles in the snow. But of course the book cannot reflect all the new features added to the software suite since then. For that you'll have to read the help, search the Web and discussion lists, and so on.

A question the book implicitly raises, but doesn't answer, is: given that OpenOffice.org and its offshoots are so good, how is Microsoft still selling its Office at prices much higher than free? I suppose some of the roughly 1 billion Office users worldwide really do need some proprietary feature not available in the free knock-offs, but can that be true for all of them?