Articles tagged with: 'openoffice.org'

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.

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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The following are the download links for all the software discussed in the guide. It can be used to collect all the necessary files on to your hard disk before you use the articles to install the software. It also serves as a reference to the latest versions, which may differ from the versions shown in the various guide articles, as those articles are updated somewhat less frequently.

The downloads are presented as a set of tables, one for each section of the guide. Each table gives the program name, links to the web site and where you can download the software, the current version number, which files to download, and the associated guide article.