Open Office has been gaining popularity amongst users around the world partly due to it being free and partly due to it being an amazing tool.
Open office has gained some great features that I really enjoy, saving as doc, saving as pdf, a great spell check library, and an easy to use interface. OpenOffice for me has just been an amazing journey past what Microsoft can offer with a much more intuitive interface. Starting with OpenOffice 3.0 there is now support to open the new Office 2007 docx documents within OpenOffice, although there is no way to save them back to docx it is still nice to be able to convert them to something usable.
When I started at my local university I had no idea that there was a free and open source project out there that had so much functionality. Once I got my hands on it and dealt with the minor learning curve I was back in business and every paper I have written in the last 3 years has been with an OpenOffice version.
Lets take a look at the interface.
As you can see when I start up OpenOffice for the fist time from the desktop shortcut you will see something that is pretty familiar, a wizard of sorts.
From this menu you can choose what kind of file you would like to create “Text Document”, “Spreadsheet”, “Presentation”, “Drawing”, “Database” and “Formula.”
Creating A Document
Once you choose the type of file that you would like to create a new window will open with the blank project in it. At this time you can edit anything and everything within the window. At this time you can add tables, schematics, pictures, page numbers, bullets, colors, graphs, as well as change the font and text size. You can also create a header and a footer that will dynamically change based on the page number.
Saving Your Document
When you are done editing your newly created project you have a few different options of how to save your newly created document.
At this point you can click on the “File” option in the upper right hand corner then go to “Save As”, once that is done you will be presented with another dialog will give you more options on where you would like to save your document and how.
In this window you can select the folder that you would like to store your document in along the folder view, for most people it is a wise idea to save things into “My Documents” for ease of retrieval.
Once you have located where it is that you would like to store your file you will need to type in a file name in the “file names:” box, you might want to name it something that will let you easily identify it at a later time, as you can see in the screen shot to the left I named my file “testFile1″.
After typing in a meaningful name there is one last step that can be done. By clicking on the box next to “save as type:” it will display the formats that OpenOffice can create. If the file that you created will only reside on your computer then ODF Text Document (.odt)(*.odt) file extension will be fine, if you plan on sending this file to someone in an email or distribute this file in any way you will want to select Micosoft Word 97/2000/XP (.doc) (*.doc) file extension. If you do select the Microsoft .doc extension a window will pop up saying that there are compatibility issues with versions of office, 99.9% of the time there will be nothing to worry about so you can click okay and save the file. Now that you are completely done when you open the file and just select save it will save everything to what you have just created.
If you do not yet have OpenOffice you can download it <<HERE>>
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Thanks Beedleame, appreciate it.