Point & Click OpenOffice.org!

reviewed by Robert Pritchett

Point & Click OpenOffice.org! by Robin ‘Roblimo’ Miller Is an Open Source alternative to “professional” word-processing, spreadsheeting, drawing, presenting and databasing apps. Robin  ‘Roblimo’ Miller is the editor-in-chief of the Open Source Technology Group.

At just over 200 pages, this book is intended really to be a taste-test for folks who are very, very familiar with the other office software that hails from Redmond, WA. In fact, the book goes to great pains to insure and assuage folks that there isn’t much of a difference. In fact, there are even one or two things OpenOffice.org does better, such as database manipulation and creating Flash slide shows.

Besides the CD that only has L9inux and Windows versions on it, Firefox and Thunderbird for browsing and Emailing are also included so as to round out the alternative to Redmond.

When I did the pre-press review of the book, I asked if he would include NeoOffice on the CD and I was told it is still too much in beta to be included. OpenOffice.org is now in rev 2.0.

I would consider this a companion-book to OpenOffice.org Writer we reviewed back in November 2004 at http://www.maccompanion.com/macc/archives/november2004/books/OpenOffice.html where we showed links, etc. to NeoOffice. The alpha version 1.2 of NeoOffice was released November 23, 2005, so you can see why Robin Miller opted not to include it on his CD. After all, the alpha version is 124 MB in size. NeoOffice/J is also available and it is a 126 MB download for Java-based environments.

Was there room on the CD for NeoOffice? Yes, but would you publicly distribute an Alpha version of anything? Me neither.

The other CD is where we get to see Robin Miller up close and personal with 20 Open Office.org tasks he walks through with some excellent videocast-quality tutorials.

The book is divided into three sections and spread among twelve chapters and two Appendices covering both basic and advanced Writer, Impress (the slide show presentation app), Draw, Calc and sharing files with Microsoft Office an dhow OpenOffice.org is a community effort. The last section discusses Firefox and Thunderbird, which at first blush, looks like they are out of place since the book is about OpenOffice.org, but would you expect anything different from the Open Source Technology Group? They want all apps to be Open Source!

The appendices talk about what is on the CDs and also list other resources. Of course, if you really wanted to, you could go spend $80 USD on StarOffice at http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/index.jsp, but I think you will enjoy OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice as alternatives to more expensive software.

All you’ve got to really loose is some bandwidth if you use a Mac, or some hard drive space if you use non-Mac systems.