Free Tech Support

This is another beautiful part of the open source community. Right now you're an OOo beginner. At some point you'll have questions about OOo that this book hasn't answered for you. Many of us find that the best place to get answers to our OOo questions is the OpenOffice.org forums at www.oooforums.org.

OpenOffice.org help forums.

This is just one of many places on the World Wide Web you can go for free OOo help. Type "OpenOffice.org help" into any search engine, and you'll find many others.

The people helping you on these forums are not paid for their work, so please make sure you are polite whenever you post a question. Also, remember that the biggest courtesy of all when requesting free help online is to search for questions similar to yours that have already been answered before you post your own.

There's another catch to this "users helping users" concept, albeit a voluntary one: Right now you may have plenty of questions and no answers, but if you keep using OOo and keep watching those help forums, sooner or later a question will come up that you will be able to answer. Go ahead and answer it. Then answer some more as you become more proficient with OOobecause while you are learning, more new people will start using it and will ask questions. This will be your payback to the people who helped you, and it will make you a full part of the open source community. You will not only have received but will have given. This is what makes "open source software" a community instead of just a way to develop and distribute software.