The last chapter, called Moving from Microsoft Word, might be the one that should be moved to the front. Many readers would be interested in how much hassle it would be to switch, and how much interoperability there is between Word and OpenOffice Writer. It’s a good news/bad news situation:
The good news is that you can do almost anything in Writer that you can do in Microsoft Word, and a few things that you can’t do as easily in Word. If you decide to make the change, you’ll need to learn some new ways of working, but you should be happy with the results.
The bad news is that if you need to convert existing documents from Microsoft Word to Writer, you may have to do some manual cleaning up of those files, or you may need to develop templates and macros to assist in the conversion.
My own experience is that OpenOffice is fine as long as your output is going to be shared with others either as hard copy or as PDFs. (OpenOffice can natively save to PDF files.) However, if you have to share files with Word users on a steady basis, switching is probably going to cause too many problems in exporting and importing, unless the documents are very simple.
As long as you don’t have to share, though, OpenOffice may be all you need. This book is an example of “eating your own dog food” for it was written entirely in OpenOffice.org Writer. The ample illustrations and layout of the book show what is possible with the software. At one time, the only documentation for OpenOffice was written by geeks and for geeks. This book is a definite step up.
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