OpenOffice.org
From Schoolforge-UK
Contents |
What it is:
OpenOffice.org is the development engine of StarOffice - it provides a full-featured office suite, which in contrast to a number of its competitors, has been developed FROM the ground up as a single network-ready application. In stark contrast with their major competitor, both OpenOffice.org and StarOffice are true cross platform applications; OpenOffice.org is available for 6 operating systems!
There is a pdf export as standard FROM OpenOffice Writer and the Draw program is excellent for teaching the principles of vector drawing to illustrate childrens work and as a primer for Computer Aided Design. The Spreadsheet and Presentation tools are also powerful. A database component (HSQLDB) will be available from Version 2.0, whilst keeping the support that exists in earlier versions for database servers such as MySQL and PosgreSQL.
A pre-release review of Version 2.0 is here.
For more information (and to download the OpenOffice.org suite for free), see:
You can also obtain OpenOffice.org on CD-ROM FROM several suppliers on this website.
For some background information, see:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
Online training materials
- http://www.itrainonline.org/itrainonline/mmtk/opensource.shtml provides freely downloadable materials in OpenOffice and PDF formats for 6 courses covering Open Source software and using OpenOffice.org.
- http://www.openoffice-support.net/ provides numerous links to freely available tutorials, manuals, introductions and how-tos.
- OOExtras is a volunteer-built SourceForge site with collection of artwork and labels, as well as projects and tutorials, with translations to several other languages.
OpenOffice.org XML Data Formats
An important feature of OpenOffice.org is that it stores data files in open XML formats. A book is being written about the OpenOffice.org XML data formats, and will be published under a Creative Commons licence. You can read the book on-line or download it from:
JohnIngleby 16:40, 16 Dec 2004 (GMT)
Sample database
Jacket Potato is a sample ready made database for the OOo 2.0 embedded database. It means you have a ready prepared data source with which to start teaching/learning.
http://nothickmanuals.info/doku.php?id=jacketpotato
Ian Lynch 25-Feb-2005
