OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas

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!

Two ways to preview your data in an OpenOffice Writer mail merge

There isn't a preview button per se but there are two ways to see the actual data, rather than the mail merge fields, in a mail merge.

Here's a PDF from my workbooks with two approaches. One is just printing several or all of the records to one OpenOffice Writer file, then opening that up to look. The other is to click a button in the database view area, which lets you see just one page of records (one, for a mail merge letter or an envelope, or a whole label sheet full for labels).

The PDF starts out with standard mail merge printing instructions, and the two preview techniques are at the end.