Open Office Help

Basics

OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open source project. It's compatible with all other major office suites, meaning you'll be able to open, work with and save files in formats used by other suites like MS Office. Moreover, OpenOffice.org is free to download, use and distribute. As an introduction to OpenOffice.org, K12ed.com.org has produced a series of Flash tutorials for newcomers, which those migrating from other office suites may find helpful too.

• Online instruction
• Official manuals
• Frequently asked questions
• Sharing files with Microsoft

Moving from Word: Writer (word processing)

If you have used MS Word for years, you will find OpenOffice.org Writer very similar, but with a number of benefits (e.g. the ability to export your work directly as a PDF file). Occasionally you may run into problems with macros. Although the programming syntax is similar, the way objects are treated is different and thus macro compatibility is lost between the applications. This applies to Word and Excel macros. In the event of your moving across we can check all your files to ensure full compatibility.

You can find a repository of macros here and here. The second link also includes a UK Thesaurus for both versions 1 and 2 of Open Office.

Moving from Excel: Calc (spreadsheet)

http://www.tutorialsforopenoffice.org/category_index/spreadsheet.html

This is a link for tutorials for openoffice

http://www.tutorialsforopenoffice.org/category_index/spreadsheet.html

useful templates

Moving from Powerpoint: Impress (presentation)

There are some flash presentations on how to use Impress here:

http://www.learnopenoffice.org/tutorials.htm

Moving from Access : Openoffice Database

This link below shows how to create a database from scratch with some explanatory illustrations:

http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid39_gci1148271,00.html