Open Office Writer by Jean Hollis Weber

There are a number of reasons that Microsoft Office (and Word) have a monopolistic death grip on the office applications market. One definite advantage of staying with Microsoft is the huge source of third-party help in the form of books, manuals, tutorials and the like. While you may be intrigued by OpenOffice, the open-source suite of programs, at one point you would have been on your own in training yourself to use it. That’s starting to change. There's now a Dummies and a Teach Yourself book, but they normally just scratch the surface.

OpenOffice.org Writer by Jean Hollis Weber is one of the first books I’ve seen that focuses on how to use the word processing component of the free software. OpenOffice Writer probably has at least seventy five percent of the functionality of Microsoft Word, and it is the seventy-five percent that you use all the time. Although it doesn’t do everything that MS Word does, it’s a whole lot cheaper. In fact, the whole office suite is a free 65 MB download from OpenOffice.org.

The book assumes that you've already made the decision to switch to OpenOffice; in fact, it also assumes that you've got the software up and running, too. There's no discussion of the pros and cons of the program, nor how to get it (it's at http://download.openoffice.org/1.1.4/) or install it. It also assumes that you already know how to use a word processor. As the author states:

This book is for intermediate and advanced users of OpenOffice.org Writer. You may not have used this program before, buy you have used another word processor (such as Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect) and are familiar with the basics of word processing.

That means while OpenOffice may be ideal for the educational market because of its price, this book won’t be a good choice for teaching beginners.

What it is good for is teaching many of the advanced functions found in OpenOffice. It starts in the first chapter by diving right into some of the advanced configuration options. It may not be the smoothest way to open a book, because you’ve zoomed in on some of the leaves before you know where you are in the forest.

On the other hand, a book like this isn’t necessarily designed to be read cover to cover. Pick the topic you need to know out of the detailed Table of Contents or Index, and zoom right in on what you need to know. This book covers the following:

• Writing, Editing and Reviewing Documents: including spell checking, revision tracking, find and replacing text.
• Page layout: including page styles, columns, tables, and frames
• Using templates and styles
• Using Fields, Tables of Contents, Indexes, and Bibliographies
• Working with large documents: including master documents, chapters, footnotes and endnotes.
• Placing and manipulating graphics

You can see the full index, table of contents, and a sample chapter at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/openoffice/

Article Author: Bruce Kratofil

Bruce Kratofil blogs on bugs and other things that can go wrong with your computer at The BugBlog, and writes about computers and economics at BJK Research

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