Open Office Extensions

Open Office recently pushed out version 3.0 as a beta release.

Update: Time has passed since the initial publication of the article. The most recent version of OpenOffice, now called Apache OpenOffice by the way, is version 4.0.1.  Extensions are still supported by the program, and the list of popular extensions that you find below are still valid.

We had to remove some as they were removed from the extension repository.

It’s a bit slower the 2.4, it’s got a nice new start center, an icon refresh, a zoom control on the status bar and is now capable of supporting extensions to increase functionality.

To be honest I can’t say there are a great many useful downloads available at the moment, but some of them would be pretty handy if you use Open Office on a regular basis:

Professional Template Pack
A collection of elements to create your own professional style templates for documents, forms and presentations. There is also the Professional Template Pack II which got added recently. We have linked to English template packs, but you find packs for other languages such as German or Spanish on the Open Office website as well.

Sun Web Blog Publisher
Microsoft Word 2007 comes with some impressive blogging capabilities, but now Writer can too. This extension supports “many popular blog services'”, so having not used it I can’t guarantee it’ll work for yours, but give it a try and see.

Note: While still available, it has not been updated since 2009.

GoogleDocs to Open Office.
This works for both Google Docs and Zoho and can import and export your documents and presentations between Open Office and the wo online services. Now also supports WebDAV servers.

Note: requires Java to work, not updated since 2011.

Oxygen Office Gallery Extras
A compilation of clip art and templates for your documents. Comes with multiple languages and with some other extras. Templates are available in other languages as well.

Pagination
A simple little dialogue to insert page numbers, works with all localizations.

Crop Images
Crop images in Draw and Impress with this add-on.

Writer’s Tools
If you live in Writer during the day, churning out documents or whatever it is you do then this pack will provide you with all the extra functions and features necessary. There are some pretty useless additions to this set, but some notable tools are:

• Lookup Tool
• Email Backup
• Remote Backup
• Start/Stop Timer
• Add to Basket
• miniInvoices

Test Fonts
This seems pretty handy, it searches for all the fonts contained in the document on your system. It then reports on missing fonts, all used fonts and gives statistics on available fonts.

Update: no longer available.

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