The plugin will remove unnecessary data from the Open Office presentation and compress images automatically. This can be for instance useful before transferring a presentation for print so that it can be presented on screen which usually does not require the same quality of the images and can reduce the size of the presentation a lot. The Presentation Minimizer can also replace OLE objects with images.

It can also remove notes or hidden and blank slides (slides that are not used in the presentation) to further minimize the size of the presentation and prevent that confidential information are distributed with the presentation. This feature alone might make it useful even without reducing the size by compressing images.

The user can pick between jpeg and lossless compression. The former allowing to select the quality level of the images. A wizard will display the size reduction in the end with the option to open the resized presentation afterwards. It is also interesting to note that the Presentation Minimizer will work with both Open Office presentations and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.

The presenter console displays the current slide, a smaller preview of the upcoming slide and a tool bar with navigational buttons and the current and elapsed time. There are additional options to display the notes of the current slide and view a slide overview which is also excellent for quick navigation.

The presenter console will automatically detect if more than one screen is available. Sun’s presenter console is able to detect the screen that is used for the presentation and will automatically display itself on the other display.

Installation of the Google Docs Open Office extension could not be easier. A double-click on the program’s icon after downloading it should open the Extension Manager of Open Office automatically with a prompt to install the extension. The selection of yes will install it.

The extension will display five new icons that can be placed in a Open Office toolbar. Here is what they do from left to right: Export to Google Docs, Import from Google Docs, Export to Zoho, Import from Zoho, Export to WebDAV server.

A click on an icon will open a new dialog. It is usually required to provide account information of the service or server before performing the action. To export a document to Google Docs one would have to supply the Google username and password which can be saved locally to avoid the hassle of having to fill out the information every time that feature is being used.

Importing documents works pretty much the same way with the difference that all supported documents that are available online will be displayed giving the user the choice to load them locally or in the browser.

The document import is limited. It is possible to import text documents or presentations from Google Docs. Zoho is supporting the import of spreadsheets in addition to that. Virtually any document can be exported to both services though.

Users can add the Bookmarks extension to Open Office in the Tools > Extensions Manager menu after downloading the Bookmarks Menu extension from the Open Office website. A new entry entitled Add-ons will be added to the Tools menu after restarting Open Office.

That menu provides the help for the extension and the means to create a folder and file structure for the “real” menu which will be available under Bookmark in the main menu toolbar.

Two default entries are added to the new Bookmarks menu. The first is the Bookmark This Document which will add a bookmark for the current document while the second provides access to all bookmarks and options to edit them.

The free version of this extension comes with support for the languages English, German and French and offers support to add additional dictionaries in csv format. The commercial version which is available for roughly 5€ supports the popular .dict format as well.

Translations are obviously available in both directions but those have to be selected separately. If you come upon a text that mixes languages you have to switch. Say you got a text that uses German and English words. You have to select if you want to translate German into English or English into German from the toolbar and need to switch if you encounter words in the second language.

Translations work pretty well. The word has to be clicked on and the translation will appear instantly in the toolbar along with the selected word in the original language.

The extension does have some shortcomings that are dealt with in the commercial version. It’s definitely easier to add .dict files than .csv dictionaries. The free version does not recognize phrases and has no means to add new words from within the application. It still might be helpful if you regularly work with German, English and French documents and are not fluent in at least one of the languages.

The extension works well with the latest Open Office 3 beta and all supported operating systems.