Articles tagged with: '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.

OpenOffice.org has a long history. It started life as Star Office, a German commercial competitor to Microsoft Office. It was then bought by Sun Microsystems Inc who later released the source code as an open source project. Many developers became involved in the project, and version 1.0 was extremely popular.

Since then OpenOffice.org has been restructured to use the Oasis Open Document Format, and is currently reworking the source code to allow developers to produce their own extensions more simply – a feature which has made Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird very popular.

OpenOffice.org provides very stable file importing and exporting facilities for most popular commercial file formats, particularly Microsoft Office, and provides a complete office suite solution. An interesting thermometer of its popularity is the number of books that have been published recently, and, at least in Europe, that OpenOffice.org can now be used for the European Computer Driving License.

FreeMind is a simple mind mapping tool, written in Java, by Jörg Müller. Mind maps present hierarchical lists, using nodes and edges, displayed graphically. I personally find it easier to prepare a graphical project outline, rather than a formal high level project specification.

Additionally, it is easier to start building a graph, rather than preparing a text document – it can help get over the “blank page” writing block that most people suffer from occasionally, and it is easier to add, delete, or move elements around. Finally, it provides a succinct overview, which can be more easily absorbed by colleagues. FreeMind is an open source implementation, which has been well received by users and industry critics alike.

The GIMP is another excellent and successful open source project. It was originally developed for the Linux operating system, but is now available on most of the major operating systems, including Windows and Macintosh OS X.

It provides a series of powerful image processing tools, and is more sophisticated, and thus more complicated than normal painting type programs. It is generally compared favourably against top line professional commercial image processing software.

Apart from advising you on choosing from the enormous amount of software available, and showing you how to install, and uninstall the software, the guide also provides pragmatic information on using the programs.

The goal of these tutorials is to provide you with just enough knowledge to make you reasonably competent in the shortest time. They also serve as a basis to become proficient in using one or more of the programs, should you wish to invest further time on them, by offering pointers to more detailed information available on the Internet.

The OpenOffice.org office suite is a big program. In this tutorial, I will introduce you to some of the most important topics, available in all of the suite's programs. The guide's choice of office suite software is OpenOffice.org, an open source project, sponsored by Sun Microsystems Inc.

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In this tutorial, we'll look at creating a mind map. Just to remind you, a mind map is a hierarchical set of nodes, connected together by edges (lines), which are displayed as a graphical map. The guide's choice of mind mapping software is FreeMind, an open source program, by Jörg Müller.

This tutorial will show you how to make basic modifications to an image. These include rotating, cropping and scaling an image, reducing an image's file size, and creating a transparent background. The guide's choice of image processing software is the GIMP.

The GIMP is capable of much more than I can show in this short tutorial, the aim here is to introduce the program to you, without introducing too many concepts (such as layers and paths) which would be needed to produce professional graphic designs.