Articles - OSA

If you're installing a more recent version of Openoffice, you might want to have a look at our articles covering Openoffice 2.0.

An introduction to Open Office part 2

What does Open Office have to offer?

Currently it has a word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc), and a presentation application (Impress) - the things a basic office package needs. There is also a drawing application (Draw), a Math formula editor, and in the Windows versions a HTML Editor and "OpenOffice.org Global". I will go through all of them.

Quickstarter

You will find the Quickstarter as a tray icon in the bottom right corner of your desktop. Double clicking the icon will give you a menu as shown above. This menu will let you make a new document, and Open Office automatically opens the application needed for the chosen document. Try it out, nifty.

Writer

This is the text editor in Open office, it has pretty much the same layout as Word from Microsoft, so if you are a bit familiar with Word this shouldn't be too hard to get to know. :) The text editor has however a tool bar on the left side with some nice functions. I will elaborate on the text editor in a later article.

Calc

Again you might see a familiar user interface, the spreadsheet has the same functions as Excel, and then some. :) Again notice the toolbar on the left side of the screenshot. This is one of the best parts of the Open Office suite, I urge you to explore a bit on your own, you might learn something. ;)

Impress

Impress is the presentation application in Open Office. Opening Impress will give you this start window(as shown above), where you can choose to start with an empty or existing document, or from template. If you choose to open a empty document you will see a well developed application which for fills the needs you may have making a presentation.

Draw

The drawing application in Open Office is quite nifty, I will elaborate on this in a coming article, yet again, the user interface should be familiar to the most of you, the draw applicaton is compatible with most known file types.

HTML editor

Your standard HTML editor. :) Nice application. Maybe not used by most of you, but if you ever need one this is the one to use. :)

Hopefully you will now got some insight in what Open Office has to offer, it's quite a suite with lots of nice and well working features. And on top of that, it's all free. You should really give this suite a shot.

This is the second in a series of articles about Open Office, if you have Open Office related topics you'd like to see covered here, let us know. Comments on this article, thumbs up or flames, can be sent to articles@nidelven-it.no .

Go to part 1 2 3 4 5 6.