So you're an IT director. You want to make things easy for your users (and thus easy for your team so they need to answer fewer questions). One way to make things very easy and simple for your users is to create templates.

With OpenOffice.org 2.4 just released, OpenOffice.org 3.0 (OOo3) has already passed its feature freeze, and is scheduled for release in September. Based on recent development builds, what can you expect? In the Base, Draw, and Math applications, very little change, at least so far. But in the core programs of Writer, Impress, and Calc, some long-awaited new features are arriving. Combined with the improvements in the charting system that are the major feature of the 2.4 release, these new features promise to increase both usability and functionality, although some of the changes do not go far enough.

Extensions have long been written for OpenOffice.org Writer. However, the fact that attention is finally being paid to other applications seems a sign that OpenOffice.org is finally starting to develop an active extension-writing community.

Following on from my piece on whether OpenOffice.org can do the job I have remembered that OpenOffice.org 3.0 is due for release in September. So—with my comments on 2.3 in mind—let’s see whether the new version will address my needs.

As most company standard builds are now including Microsoft office 2007 you will start seeing more .docx documents. This has been covered time and time again but still people still ask the question.

OpenOffice.org, productivity suite included in Ubuntu, just released version 2.4. OpenOffice.org 2.4 is a minor release, the last before version 3.0, but it includes plenty of new features and fixes. OpenOffice.org Ninja has a post with screenshots, and The official release notes detail every change and fix.

Faxes are the technology that won't die. Having become popular in the 1970s, they persist in modern business, despite being redundant and needlessly complicated. Increasingly, fax capacity has been transferred online, often via office suites. In keeping with this norm, OpenOffice.org offers everything you need to fax from within it, but you do need to do some configuration both inside and outside OpenOffice.org before you can use the office suite for faxing.

I came across this while working with a spreadsheet that was perhaps a little too fancy to come over from Excel to OpenOffice Calc. Let's say you keep a spreadsheet full of various numbers, and they fall into about five or six categories. You have a bunch of things that are categorizable as:

After a slow start, add-ons for OpenOffice.org are finally starting to reach a critical mass. When I last wrote about add-ons for OpenOffice.org in September 2004, the examples were relatively limited, with extendedPDF the outstanding example. Today, extendedPDF remains a must-have -- so much so that Debian versions of OpenOffice.org include it as part of the basic packages -- but the choices have expanded dramatically. There is even a web page that is slowly beginning to rival the Firefox extension page.

After changing your Ubuntu system icon theme you may find that OpenOffice’s toolbar icons have disappeared. There’s an easy fix for this.

Here we will discuss the procedure to be followed for making OpenOffice run faster in Ubuntu. Some simple steps make OpenOffice snappier. First go to Applications > Office > OpenOffice.org Word Processor.

I've talked a lot about how IT administrators should take all the free clip art they can download, assemble it and categorize it, and give it to every user to make OpenOffice.org more fun and more usable. I have pointed to the clip art (see the new list at the left side of this blog page about free clip art, templates, and fonts) but have yet to specify how to do it.

This excellent tip comes to me from Robert. You can specify the number of slides in your Presentation handouts. Click the Handouts tab at the top  of the work area and you get this view. Pick 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6 slides per page. But sometimes the slide placeholders are kind of small. Really small. It varies a bit depending on what your page orientation was when you made the change.

One thing you can do is switch between number of slides per page, like from 6 to 2 to 3. That can help.

Another approach, you're thinking is "Hey, why not resize the slides????" That would be nice, but when you move your mouse over the corner handle, you get the "denied!" ghostbusters symbol.

Other than being a free complete office suite, OpenOffice allows users to install extensions to improve its functionality and enhance the user experience. Here is a list of useful extensions for you.

There's a nice little extension for OpenOffice.org that lets you quickly upload your document to your googledocs account. Click here to get it.

One of the most welcome additions to OpenOffice.org 2.3 is a new export filter that allows you to save Writer documents as MediaWiki-formatted pages. That's all fine and dandy if you are using MediaWiki, but what about other wiki systems?

Some days ago I met some old friends at an anniversary. The discussion went from latest activities each of us is doing to foreign languages learning which was someone's favorite. There were mentions about tools and resources you can find on the Internet today to improve your language skills, free online lessons and language tests, literature freely available in every language, even games and chat usage, etc.

To continue my look at how non-profits and the free software community can engage, I’ve decided to look at some popular free software products and see how well they fit the need of an average charity—namely my employer. I’ll start with OpenOffice.org.

Apparently, the only thing that stopped developers from creating useful OpenOffice.org extensions was the lack of a place to publish them. With the launch of the OpenOffice.org Extension Repository, the number of extensions listed there has shot up, and there are no signs of a slowdown. Although quantity doesn't always mean quality, the repository already offers a few nifty extensions that can expand the functionality of OpenOffice.org and make your work more efficient.

A question from Panosso:

Does any one can help-me…
…I have no idea how can I add a new language on OO dictionary.