OpenOffice.org

 < Day Day Up > 



Whether they should be or not, people are quite obsessed with office suites, even though most people seldom need more than a word processor. The de facto standard among office suites is Microsoft Office, which is available in both the Windows and Macintosh worlds. Of course, as it is a Microsoft product, you can be quite sure that there is no Linux version available.

Fortunately, Linux does have an exceedingly capable office suite in the form of OpenOffice.org, which is, incidentally, also freely available (as in “free”) in Windows and Mac OS X versions. OpenOffice.org is not some lightweight sour- grapes substitute for the Microsoft Office–less Linux world; it is a full-featured contender, and in some cases, such as its onscreen font rendering, OpenOffice.org is a clear winner.

Like most other office suites, OpenOffice.org consists of a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation program, and a couple of other programs. The main three applications are compatible with their Microsoft Office equivalents (Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, respectively) in terms of both reading and writing files, and as the basic look and feel of these applications is fairly similar to Microsoft Office, switching over to the OpenOffice.org applications should be relatively easy. If you don’t have any experience with Microsoft Office, you should still find it all pretty straightforward, as the basic layout is pretty intuitive. And if you are lacking in the intuition department, the built-in help files are pretty good, too.

To get OpenOffice.org up and running, launch the application you wish to use (I’d recommend the word processor for now) by going to the Main menu, selecting Office, and then selecting the office application of your choice. Remember that the launchers for the word processor and spreadsheet should still be on your panel too.

Turning On Tips

Once you have started one of the OpenOffice.org programs, I suggest turning on OpenOffice.org’s Tips function to help you along the way as you take a further look at the applications that make up the OpenOffice.org suite.

OpenOffice.org’s Tips system is just like similar systems in the Windows and Mac worlds. In fact, you have a similar feature in the GNOME environment, though it doesn’t carry through to OpenOffice.org.

In case you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, tips are those little yellow boxes that pop up to tell you what a button or menu item does when you place your mouse over that button or menu item. Figure 15-1 shows the two types of tips available in OpenOffice.org applications: the usual short variety and the more verbose extended variety.


Figure 15-1: The two types of tips in OpenOffice.org: standard (top) and extended (bottom)

To activate Tips, go to the Help menu and select Tips, and if you prefer a bit more verbiage, select Extended Tips as well.

Getting to Know Those Other Buttons

Now that you have Tips activated, you should have no trouble figuring out what the various buttons and menu items in the OpenOffice.org applications do. There are, however, a few buttons that most likely require, or at least deserve, a bit more explanation (see Figure 15-2).

click to expand
Figure 15-2: The Function toolbar in OpenOffice.org

The first odd button is situated just to the left of the printer icon. This is the PDF button, and you can use it to export your document as a PDF file. This button is a new feature in OpenOffice.org 1.1.0, though the actual PDF-creating function was present in previous versions of OpenOffice.org via the Print dialog box. As mentioned in Chapter 6, PDF files can still be created via the Print dialog box in OpenOffice.org version 1.1.0.

There are four other strange-looking buttons at the right end of the toolbar shown in Figure 15-2. These four buttons are all actually toggle switches, meaning that they open a certain window when clicked and then close the same window when clicked again. From left to right, these buttons toggle the Navigator window, the Stylist window, the Hyperlink window, and the Gallery.

  • Navigator window The Navigator window (see Figure 15-3 on the next page) is a pretty cool navigational feature that comes in handy when working with lengthy or otherwise complex documents. Navigator allows you to easily bounce back and forth between pages in a document, or even between elements therein. Let’s say that you have a document with lots of illustrations in it (like this chapter), and you want to jump directly from graphic to graphic. In this case, you would click the word Graphics in the main pane of the Navigator window and then click the jump buttons (the odd little buttons to the left of the page number selector) to begin jumping.


    Figure 15-3: The Navigator window

  • Stylist window The Stylist window allows you to apply various styles (chapter headings, paragraph styles, numbering, and so on) to sections of text.

  • Hyperlink window The Hyperlink window allows you to assign links to spec- ified documents — not only to Web pages, but also to documents on an individual computer. While a hyperlink on a Web page is something we have all come to take for granted, the idea of hyperlinking between text documents sounds like a pretty radical concept. It is, in fact, a rather old one that has been around since before you or I had even heard of the Internet.

  • Gallery The Gallery is a library of graphical elements for use in your documents or Web pages (see Figure 15-4). These elements range from various lines to buttons to colored three-dimensional doughnuts, and you can even add your own.

    click to expand
    Figure 15-4: The Gallery

Inserting a graphic into your document is a simple enough task even when not using the Gallery. All you need to do is go to the Insert menu, select Graphics > From File, and then locate the image file you want to insert. It is handier to use the Gallery, however, when you intend to use certain graphics frequently. Once in the Gallery, your graphics are always only a click or two away and can be conveniently viewed in the Gallery browser window.

Adding your own graphics to the Gallery is also relatively easy to do. First you have to create a new category (called a theme) for each group of images you wish to add. To create a Gallery theme of your own, just click the New Theme button in the Gallery window. This will open the New Theme Properties window, where you should first click the General tab and give your theme a name. Once you’ve done that, click the Files tab, and then the Find Files button, which will bring up a Select path window. From there you can navigate to the folder in which you are storing your clip art, photos, or other graphics. Once you have found the folder, click the Select button, after which a list of all the files in that folder will appear in New Theme Properties window.

Now, you can easily add images to your new Gallery theme by clicking on the name of each image you wish to add (you might want to make sure that Preview is checked to make things a bit easier), and then clicking the Add button. Once you have done that, a copy of the image will immediately appear in the Gallery browser, where it will remain for future use. To use one of the images in the gallery, just right-click on the image you wish to insert into your document, and then select Copy or Link in the pop-up menu.



 < Day Day Up > 



Linux for Non-Geeks. A Hands-On, Project-Based, Take-It-Slow Guidebook
Linux for Non-Geeks: A Hands-On, Project-Based, Take-It-Slow Guidebook
ISBN: 1593270348
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 188

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net