The interface is different as well. Open Office 4 Kids makes use of less buttons in the interface and divides them into a header toolbar and sidebar. The changes are slim at the moment but the developers have plans to implement additional changes in future releases. The main difference on the other hand is that Open Office 4 Kids is a simplified version of Open Office.

As you probably know, the OpenOffice.org Education Project aims to create a bridge between Educational world an OpenOffice.org, through several actions. One of the results is OOo4Kids

The development release 0.5 of Open Office 4 Kids can be downloaded from the project website. It is available for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Apple Macintosh operating systems.

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• The Bubble Chart is available as new chart type now
• Keyboard shortcut configuration dialog now supports “ALT” modifier
• Removed the password length limitation in ODF document password creation dialog
• Menu items display changed
• Support for PS-OpenType fonts
• Impress and Draw now support comments (formerly known as sticky notes) to support collaboration
• More filter criteria in “Standard Filter” dialog
• Use System Credentials for Web Site Authentication
• “Notes” feature renamed to “Comments”
• Encryption support for “Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP” filter.

Users who are interested in testing Open Office 3.2 Beta can head over to the official Open Office website to download the beta version. The beta is available for all supported operating systems and languages. The list of changes and additions implemented in Open Office 3.2 are available at the release notes page.

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The 280 Slides website offers direct access to the presentation editor. All functions are free to use and require not registration except for saving presentations. Downloads are possible without registration and the service offers to create presentations in Microsoft Power Point 2003, Microsoft Power Point 2007, Open Office or Adobe PDF format.

Presentations can be easily created. A wizard will be displayed at the beginning with the option to take a tour of the service or create a new presentation right away. Various templates are available including black and white backgrounds but also others that include gradients or a sky like template.

Text can be added and edited using the normal text editing controls that can change the font, sizes and various other aspects of the text. Pictures and videos can be added either from online sources or from the local computer system.

Notes can be added to the presentations and a preview option is available to preview the presentation online. Another interesting option is the ability to import local presentations from Microsoft Power Point or Open Office which can be very useful for working on presentations on the Internet or fixing something just before a presentation if no other means of accessing the presentation is available.

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The Sun PDF Import Extension offers numerous features and, like all OpenOffice extensions, is simple to install. Let’s take a look at what it offers, how it is installed, and how it is used.

Supports

• The Sun extension includes the following features:
• Edit font attributs
• Retain font appearance
• Converts images and vector graphics
• Import of password-protected PDF files
• Import shapes with default styles
• Colors and bitmap support
• Levels remain true

Does not support

• Native PDF forms
• Proper paragraphs
• LaTeX PDF
• Complex vector graphics
• Table conversion
• EPS graphics
• RTL fonts

What should be apparent from the above lists is that the Sun PDF import extension supports primarily the more simple PDF documents. Once a document gets complex, this extension may or may not work.

Installation

The Sun extension works with all platforms of OpenOffice. So no matter if you are using OpenOffice on Linux, Solaris, Windows, or Mac you will be okay. To install this extension go to the project page and scroll down until you see all of the “Get It!” buttons. Here you will click on the button that corresponds with your platform. When you do this a dialogue box will open asking you what you want to do with the file. If you are offered to open the file with OpenOffice do so. If not just save the file. If you are able to go with the former option the OpenOffice extension installer will automatically open up. This is very much like installing an extension in Firefox. You simply have to OK the installation. Unlike Firefox, however, you do not have to restart OpenOffice.

Figure 1

If you had to save the file, never fear, all you have to do is open up OpenOffice  Writer, go to the Tools menu, and select Extensions manager. When the manager opens click the Add button, navigate to the directory you saved the extension file in, and click Open. Once the extension is installed you will see it listed in the manager (see Figure 1).

Usage

Figure 2

When you open up a PDF document OpenOffice will open the document in OpenOffice Draw. With your document opened in this application you will be able to edit the various elements of the document.

Figure 2 shows a PDF document (that was actually exported from a presentation document) opened in Draw (with the help of the Sun PDF Import Extension). In this image you can see a text element ready for editing. To edit a text element you simply double click the element to make your edits. If you right click an image you will see a menu that includes entries for various arrangments of the image, cropping, and converting. You can convert embedded images into different types of objects (Polygons, Contour, 3D, 3D Rotation File, or Metafile).

When you go to save your document, if you want to save the document as a PDF you have to use the Export to PDF and not Save As. If you want to save the document in one of the supported OpenOffice Draw formats you can use Save As.

Final thoughts

I do a lot of PDF documents. Some times I get requests to alter PDF documents and now, thanks to Sun and OpenOffice, I can take care of those requests. Granted I can not use this tool with more complex documents, but for more simple PDF files this tool is magic.

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Now normally I do frequent saving to avoid such issues. But right now there is no Save Draft function so I rely on frequent saving to OpenOffice. It always works and I rarely have issues. This time, however, I did. When I un-iconified OpenOffice (I am using Elive-Compiz so applications minimize to icons) everything but he cursor and keyboard froze up tight. Or so I thought.What actually happened was that OpenOffice caused an issue keeping me from gaining access to any application. I could move the cursor but that was it. I couldn’t get a menu or interact with any applications.

What happened?

For those that are curious here is the output of my ~/.xsession-errors file:
window managed: 0xc0155b : 0x40abdc, 402
window managed: 0xc01576 : 0x40afed, 402
Unhandled property: 41 font
Unhandled property: 41 font
_e_container_cb_mouse_down
_e_container_cb_mouse_down
_e_container_cb_mouse_down
window managed: 0xc015dc : 0x14035fe, 402
act fn max
max parse: NONE
window managed: 0xc01637 : 0x1c0b86d, 402
_e_container_cb_mouse_down
efreet_desktop_new error: no Desktop Entry section
_e_container_cb_mouse_down
window managed: 0xc016f0 : 0x240000a, 402

After a bit of research it looks like it could be an autoraise error. That, of course, doesn’t mention how I got out of this situation. Let’s take a look.

How it worked out

Fortunately I had a good idea which application caused the problem. I assumed this because OpenOffice Writer was the last application I had any interaction with. Even if it wasn’t OpenOffice I had the following applications open that could have possibly caused the problem.

• Claws Mail
• Firefox
• Rhythmbox
• GnuCash
• xterm

I had to hope that the issue wasn’t Firefox, because that was the data I really needed to save. So, with my list in hand I hopped over to a virtual console to see if I could get lucky.

Getting to a virtual console

Virtual consoles allow you to, effectively, have more than one user logged in. Or you could have the same user logged in with one instance being a graphical desktop and the other a command line desktop. To get to different virtual desktops you enter the Ctrl-Alt-F*keys (Where * is 1-0). When I got to the virtual console I logged in with the my standard user information and was greeted with my bash prompt. Since I assumed the culprit was OpenOffice writer I wanted to get the PID of this application so I issued the command:

ps aux | grep soffice

Which gave the proper PID for the currently running command soffice -writer. The next step was to issue the kill command on the PID like so:

kill PID

Where PID is the actual PID given to me by the ps command above.

When the process was killed I then hopped back to my original console (in my case it was Ctrl-Alt-F7) and, lo and behold, I had regained control of my desktop. I could then re-open OpenOffice, save my work, finish my article, and submit.

Bullet Doged.

Final thoughts

Yes this whole situation could have been avoided with a working Save Draft feature, but that is not available yet. I could have also been using a different desktop. The “what ifs” could go on and on. But ultimately these things happen and it’s always nice to know you have the means to solve the problem, even if you have to get creative to do so.

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All ways of opening Microsoft Excel spreadsheets can be divided into an online and offline category. The online category usually requires an account at some website before the spreadsheets can be worked with.

Computer Software Programs:

Excel Viewer [link]

Microsoft’s own Excel Viewer can be used to view Excel 2007 (xlsx) and earlier Excel spreadsheets. It has a download size of 74 Megabytes and uses the same core that Microsoft Excel uses which ensures a good compatibility with all Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Open Office [link]

Open Office is considered to be the Microsoft Office alternative. It is a free Open Source office suite that can be used to open Microsoft Office document formats. The module needed to open Excel spreadsheets is called Calc and supports the new Excel 2007 xlsx format but also older Microsoft Excel documents.

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack [link]

Users who have a previous version of Microsoft Office or Microsoft Excel installed (that is pre-Excel 2007) can use the Microsoft Office compatibility pack to add support for the Excel xlsx format so that these spreadsheets can also be worked with in previous versions of Excel.

XLS Viewer 2.30 [link]

The XLS Viewer has a tiny size of just 1 Megabyte. It can open, display and print xls, xlsx and ods documents that have been created with Microsoft Office or Open Office. The computer program seems to have slight problems displaying complex spreadsheets correctly.

Online Tools

Google Docs [link]

Google Docs has only recently added support for the Excel 2007 xlsx format. The online service was able to work with standard xls documents before but the new feature makes it possible to open and work with all Excel documents in Google Docs.

Thinkfree [link]

Can be used to quickly view spreadsheets online.Supports both old and new Excel spreadsheets and various other formats.

Zoho Sheets [link]

Zoho Sheets is an online product that enables users to view and edit spreadsheets online.

Do you know of other online or offline tools that can be used to view spreadsheets? Let us know in the comments.

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With the upgrade to OpenOffice 3 a new feature was added – Extensions. Extension enable you to extend the functionality of OpenOffice. Fortunately it is possible to find plenty of templates that are rolled into an extension. Let’s take a look at how this is done.

Before you do anything with the Extension Manager you need to locate some templates. The official OpenOffice Template site doesn’t really have a large selection of templates. Your best bet is to do a search for the type of template you are looking for (Writer, Impress, Calc, etc). Once you find them if the extension is .oxt it is an extension file. If that’s the case, you’re in luck, you can install this with the Extension Manager. I found probably the best collection of Impress Templates, called Modern Impress Templates.

If you open up the main OpenOffice window (this is done by issuing the command openoffice.org or opening the OpenOffice.org menu entry from your desktop. When this window opens you will notice a Tools menu. Within the Tools menu there is an entry called Extension Manager. Click on that to open up this tool.

Figure 1

From within the Extension Manager (see Figure 1) click on the Add button to open the Add Window. Navigate to where you saved the extension file, select the file, and click Open.

In some cases you might have to agree to a license. If that’s the case, read the EULA and then click Accept. Once you have done this the extension is installed. You will see the new extension listed in the Extension Manager.

You can also add templates by clicking the Templates button in the main OpenOffice window. When you click that a template chooser opens where you can click a “Get more templates online” link. Click that to open a new Firefox window on the official OpenOffice templates page. Here you can search and download specific templates. These templates will open up in their respective tool. Once that template is open click on the File menu where you will see a Templates submenu. From within the Templates submenu click on Save to open up the Tempates organizer. Give this template a name and click Save. Now when you want to use this template again go back to that Templates submenu, and click on the Organize entry. When the organizer opens double click on the My Templates folder to reveal the template you saved.

Using your templates

Figure 2

After your templates are installed go back to the main OpenOffice window and click on the Impress button and the New wizard will start (see Figure 2). Now you should see far more templates to choose from than the default.

Final thoughts

Although OpenOffice 3 ships with a poor selection of templates to choose from, extending this selection is as simple as adding an extension.  And don’t forget, you can also create your own templates in Openoffice.

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Some of the new features that have been added to Open Office 3.1 are antialiased drawings to smooth the edges of graphics, replying to notes, improved grammar checking, hyperlink management and sorting, control of slideshow media, macro support for Open Office Base, relative database paths, better internationalization for Hebrew and Arabic plus performance improvements (read our Speed up Open Office article for even more tips on how to improve the speed and performance).

The full list of changes and new features can be seen in the official Open Office 3.1 documentation which lists all the major improvements over previous Open Office versions.

Open Office 3.1 is available as a free download for Windows, Linux and Macintosh.

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The gLabels utility works with numerous brands of labels including all of the top sellers. It includes an easy-to-use wizard to help you create labels quickly. You can add objects to labels, rotate, flip label designs, and control both vertical and horizontal alignments.

Installing

You can install gLabels by searching for it in your Add/Remove Software utility. Or you can install it from the command line like so:

sudo apt-get install glabels

Once gLabels is installed you will find it in the Office sub menu of the Applications menu in GNOME.

Creating Labels

gLabels Wizard

Creating labels with gLabels is very easy. Click the New button to open up the simplistic wizard. In this wizard you will select the brand and type of label you want to create and the orientation of the label.

Once you have selected the correct information click OK to start creating your label.

Merge

During the label creation you work to create a single label with fields and, once you are happy with your label, you merge a data file to create the entire sheet of labels. The data file can be a comma delineated file, a colon delineated file, tab delineated file, default from the Evolution address book, or from vCards.

As you create the label you have to assign each object a field name and then select which field from your merge file will be assigned. Once you go to print the file gLabels will automatically fill in the data for all the labels on the template.

Other Labels

You can do many types of labels with gLabels including CD labels and custom labels as well. The custom label wizard is easy to use and will walk you through the process of making professional looking, customized labels for any purpose.

Final Thoughts

If you’re looking for an outstanding, simple to use program to create labels in Linux, gLabels is the tool for you. Give it a try, you won’t go back to OpenOffice for your label needs ever again.

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But how many people can actually rattle off the names of five linux-based office applications? I would venture to say not many. And that’s where I come in. In this article I will list five must-have office applications that will allow you to introduce Linux into your office. Naturally this list won’t be perfect for everyone. There will always be those with proprietary needs that are simply not met by Linux. But for those who needs are more standard, this list is just for you.

1. OpenOffice. This is the obvious answer. What office isn’t complete without and office suite? How can you do you work without the ability to manage documents? But since this entry to this list is so obvious I will offer up this tip. Instead of going with the standard OpenOffice, give Go-OO a try. This office suite offers a few benefits that OpenOffice.org does not. First it has built in OpenXML support. It also offers: Better Microsoft binary support, macro fidelity, Visio embedded object support, a Solver component for Calc, and much more.

2. Kontact. I have discussed Evolution in a previous article (Replace Outlook With Evolution: An Open Source Groupware Suite) and so I thought I should offer another alternative groupware suite. And Kontact is quite a groupware suite. Kontact is the KDE groupware suite that offers quite a bit more than your average suite of tools: Email, Calendar, Todos, Contacts, RSS feeds, a Journal, Notebooks, Popup Notes, Time Tracker, and Syncing. Kontact supports groupware servers such as: Kolab, OpenXChange, eGroupware, OpenGroupware, Citadel, Exchange Server 2000, and Novell Groupwise 6.5. Kontact supports full drag and drop support with the KDE desktop.

3. Planner. This is one of the most useful of all project management tools available for open source. But Planner is not just for the GNOME desktop and Linux. A Windows installer has been created which makes Planner even more justifiable as one of the most important open source office tools. Planner handles resources, resource usage, Gantt charts, projects, and more. If you have a need for project management (and what office doesn’t), Planner is the tool you are looking for.

4. Meeting Room Booking System. Meeting Room Booking System is a web-based booking system for rooms, resources, employees, etc. MRBS is very easy to use, reliable, and flexible. I have deployed this system for various types of companies as a room reservation system, a client reservation system, a resource booking system, and more. It has a very small footprint, is written in PHP, and can use either a MySQL or Postgresql database. MRBS can be set up to automatically notify, via email, when a room/resource/employee has been booked.

5. Firefox. I hesitate to mention a piece of software that is so well known, but it goes without saying you can do little to no work without a browser these days. And what better browser to mention than Firefox. But instead of just mentioning the browser, I thought I’d share a couple of outstanding office-related firefox extensions. Zotero is an extension that enables you to easily collect, manage, and cite research sources. DataAnalytics is an extension that helps you import, analyze, and graphing of data. What can this do? Imagine being able to extract data from a web site tables and actually use it.

And there you have it. Five must-have open source office applications. Do you have an application that is a must-have that is not on this list? If so, share it with us.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The PDF document will be imported into Draw and Impress to preserve the layout of the documents. This naturally means that Draw and Impress have to be installed to work with the PDF Import Extension. Plans are to concentrate on editing capabilities in the next development step concentrating on Writer. Just keep in mind that the current version of the PDF Import Extension supports layout and not editing.

PDF documents can be imported using the Open file dialog. Import takes relatively long but the results are surprisingly good for a beta. One interesting feature of the extension is the option to create hybrid documents that consists of a pdf and odf part. Users with Open Office installed will open the ODF version of the document while users without will load the pdf part.

Open Office users that work with PDF documents from time to timeshould pay close attention to the development of the PDF Import Extension.

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The path of the final release is usually openoffice/stable/3.0.0/ on the ftp mirrors. Available are releases for all supported operating systems and the source codes. The release notes have not been updated yet but there cannot be many changes between Release Candidate 4 and the final release of Open Office due to the lack of time between the releases.

Cautious users should wait until Monday to download and install the release after the official announcement of the Open Office team.

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The application supports searching multiple folders and files and can search through document metadata such as author or properties and the text in the documents. Besides that it can also search for other document formats like plain text and Microsoft Office files.

The graphical user interface looks pretty much like the Windows 95 search box with the option to pick all or specific file types, select the root folder and the phrase. The command line version supports additional parameters that makes it possible to apply a command to all discovered files or to highlight the lines where the phrase occurred.

The software developer is currently working on support for Open Office 2 documents which is currently not available. If Open Office 2 support is requested Windows users could install the IFilterShop plugin that can search those files as well and implements in Windows Search.

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The alpha versions of Firefox 3.1 Shiretoko / Gecko 1.9.1 introduces several new features and performance improvements. It also addds support for the HTML5 video element, CSS properties and dragging and dropping tabs between browser windows. The major feature of the release will be the performance gains.

Interested users can take a look at the release notes and download Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 for all supported operating systems.

The Open Office developers are a step ahead of the Firefox development team. They left the alpha phase and have released the first release candidate of Open Office. The release notes of this release are available online. The download is available for all supported operating systems.

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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.

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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.

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It starts with additional build in file support for Microsoft Office 2007 file types like docx, pptx and xlsx which can be imported without difficulties. Other import additions include SVG and Microsoft Works support as well as a filter to import WordPerfect Graphics. Then we have improved Excel interoperability, VBA macro support, improved EMF rendering, text Grid rendering and rich fields support which might be interesting to some users.

Linux users will probably like the build in 3D transitions in presentations, the Unix systray quick-starter and GStreamer integration.

Best of all it still feels and looks like Open Office which means that transition from Open Office to Go-OO should be fluid. The only aspect that I find a bit troublesome is that the application cannot be installed if a newer version of Open Office was found on the computer. I had Open Office 3 installed and I was only able to install Go-OO after uninstalling that client.

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