Open source software.

[onejayhawk]

I recently downloaded OpenOffice.org's office software, since my most recent computer did not come with MSOffice, which is what I had before. Mostly I just do word processing and spreadsheet work related to this site.

Can anyone tell me about this stuff? I doubt I will be stretching the limits, but if there are any nifty things that I would have to look for, please let me know. For example is there any quick and easy way to capture tabular data from the net? Copy, paste to a text file and parse gets old.

For that matter are there any other handy things to download, other than the usual utilities from cnet?

J

 

[Achinz]

I take it it's the latest stable version 1.1? There should be some links in www.openoffice.org; the documentation url is:
http://documentation.openoffice.org/
and a Google search with the keywords you mentioned will give you more.

Good luck.

 

[onejayhawk]

Is it an insult to call a freshman sophmoric? Anyway, OO.org documentaion is pretty basic. Push here to turn on, etc. Programmers hate to document and it shows.

Oh well, the StarOffice manual covers most of the basics. I found the OO.org site because I had an old manual.

J

 

[Archer 007]

What can this software do?

 

[Turner]

It's basically an Office clone. It can handle all office files, such as word docs or excel spreadsheets. Not quite as good as office, but it gets the job done.

 

[Achinz]

Four important points for OOo though:

1. It's a free opensource program

2. It's files are more efficiently compact than MS Office's

3. It rate of development by its active team is incredibly fast - given it's only version 1.1 stable at the moment.

4. It's available free also for other OS's eg Linux.