Updated the 10th: An Impress PDF presentation on OpenOffice.org 3.0 features

I created this presentation  for a client, about the 3.0 features in OpenOffice.org. I'm going to do a more detailed article but I thought I would post this since I've done it. Here's the solver.ods spreadsheet you can use to fiddle with.

I got pretty excited about some of them, especially the 3-up layout with lines already in there, and the far easier Impress handout printing.

And for those who like a good cross-reference, you don't need to create them first; you can just point to a heading in a list and select it, to make the cross-reference.

Also very exciting is the PDF editing, which does some very Adobe Acrobat type things. It's in an extension you can get here.

In the words of Douglas Adams, share and enjoy!

Comments

[What is Open Office?]

Thanks, the presentation is great. I'd like to see some more info on Solver.

[Solveig]

I've added the solver.ods spreadsheet that corresponds to the info in the presentation.

[Bill]

Hi Solveig,

3.0 seems nice but they need to tweak that new Notes feature.

All the preset zoom factors like "fit width" want to put those notes on my screen as well as the document text. The 12 pt documents that were very nice in 2x are now squeezed and hard to read. Even on a larger monitor it seems like waste of screen real estate unless your documents usually have a lot of notes. It shouldn't be the only notes presentation.

So I've quickly decided to manually zoom, then use the horizontal scroll bar to slide the text onto the screen and slide the notes out of the way. Yes, that's frustrating, especially if you're zoomed to not waste much space at the text boundaries. (I use about 117% a lot and made a macro for a tool bar button).

I do like the notes marker and leader, making them easy to spot. And it's easy to scroll the note into view to read or edit.

What is hard is then scrolling back. Very annoying each time to scroll back. Lots' of nudge nudge on the scroll bar. There needs to be a one-click method to center the text boundary area.

One "trick" I noticed to return to the centered position. If you're lucky enough to have a blank line or a line with only a few words, click on that line. The cursor will slide to the far left and the screen will scroll to show the cursor, returning the screen to where you previously had it without needing the scroll bar at all. But that won't work with the paragraph formatting that separates paragraphs, of course, which aren't blank lines and won't reposition the cursor.

I hope they add more preset zooms. Ones that ignore the notes area and just center on the text area alone like it did before. And give us a "notes on/off" command or button without needing to drill down into the Options dialogs every time to toggle it.

[Bill]

It's Bill again. I posted on the 11th about the room taken in Writer by the new Notes feature.

I've been using Writer with the Navigator docked open on the side since before version 2 and didn't "notice" it taking up room itself.

I turned it off and things are not so bad. I'll use the "docking AutoHide" feature to keep it closed most of the time (that just means you first dock the window, then hide it with the button. Then if you click the edge instead of the button, the window opens and stays open until you click back onto your document.

(This is a 10" convertible Tablet PC and yes, the 3.0 works fine with the stylus, just like 2x)