Office Software

This is probably the most important section of the guide, because writing documents, spreadsheets, and occasionally presentations or databases, forms a consistent and considerable part of the working day.

The choice of office suite, and other office type applications, together with the knowledge you have in using them, is one of the most important factors dictating how much, or how little time you will spend at your computer.

The guide has taken considerable care in choosing a small set of programs which provide suitable functionality, together with a pragmatic approach to using them.

The Office Suite

The choice of office suite is fortunately very simple – there is one outstanding open source project which shines above the rest, and provides nearly all the functionality of commercial suites – OpenOffice.org.

This is one of the largest open source projects in existence. It offers a complete suite of programs; Writer for documents, Calc for spreadsheets, Impress for presentations, Base for databases, and Draw for drawings.

The guide explains installing OpenOffice.org in this article, and also provides some pragmatic tutorials on using the programs, starting with Using OpenOffice.org in this article. By the way, the guide itself was written using OpenOffice.org.

Mind Maps

Sometimes a simple plain text list isn't enough to express your ideas. A mind map provides a graphical representation of your ideas, using hierarchical, collapsible nodes.

The entire document, when fully expanded, shows the complete project. You can choose to expand or collapse individual nodes, so that, as you can see above, only a small portion of the entire project is shown in detail.

Although still at an early development stage, FreeMind, an open source project, provides reasonable functionality, though is somewhat limited when compared to commercial products such as MindManager.

The guide explains installing FreeMind in this article. The associated pragmatic tutorial for this program is Using FreeMind.

Image Processing

I'm no artist, but I frequently have to manipulate digital images, such as changing the scale, or cropping a digital photograph. A good image processing program is another important component of office software.

Choosing the right program is difficult because no one program provides a good balance between extensive functionality and simplicity of use. One of the foremost open source projects in this field is the GIMP. However, it is a more complicated program for beginners, due to the large amount of functionality available, and has a user interface which some people find difficult to use.

The guide explains installing the GIMP in this article, and also provides a pragmatic tutorial for this program in Using the GIMP.