By Bob McDonald on November 4, 2009
Note: This is the second in a multi-part series on OpenOffice Wednesday that will focus on some of the new and upgraded features that will appear in OpenOffice.org 3.2.
Part One – The Countdown Begins
First, a little housekeeping. As we mentioned at the start of the 
Countdown, OpenOffice.org 3.2 will be publicly available sometime in December. According to the OOo Wiki page, that date will be December 14, 2009. That should give us plenty of time to get through all the OOo components.
This week, of course, we start with the Writer program, which, of course, is the OpenOffice counterpart to Microsoft Word.
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Posted in OpenOffice Wednesday Tagged alternative text, apply style, openoffice 3.2, openoffice writer, release date
By Bob McDonald on October 28, 2009
After months of working on the bugs and issues from versions 3.0 and 3.1, OpenOffice.org is almost ready to release version 3.2 to the public. If you are brave enough, feel free to go ahead and download the beta version right now, though, even as OOo says, they can’t guarantee stability.
For the rest of us, the stable version of 3.2 will be upon us in December. Starting now and until the release, our OpenOffice Wednesdays will break down the changes that you may find useful for each component of the suite.
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Posted in OpenOffice Wednesday
By Bob McDonald on October 7, 2009
Whether you are an author, an editor or just someone who’s company needs to have a proposal set up, it is practically a given that your document will need a table of contents.
However, you may run into one issue. If you set up a Table of Contents using Microsoft Word, then you open the same document up in OpenOffice.org Writer, you will find that your TOC is gone. Understandably, this could be very frustrating and can really through you for a loop!
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Posted in OpenOffice Wednesday Tagged demo, microsoft word, openoffice writer, table of contents
By Bob McDonald on September 30, 2009
Even in some of its earliest incarnations, the basis of the appeal of OpenOffice.org was the ability to convert files from any of their programs into space-saving PDFs that could be viewed by anyone with Adobe Acrobat. While this function remains today, it has been, of course, been duplicated by Microsoft, who made the PDF conversion possible in their Office 2007 suite.
However, one thing they haven’t been able to duplicate is the ability to edit PDFs, which OpenOffice, with the help of one handy extension, can do.
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Posted in OpenOffice Wednesday Tagged acrobat, editing, openoffice draw, pdf
By Bob McDonald on September 16, 2009
Occasionally, I get rather irate tweets from the OpenOfficeGuy Twitter account about the overall usability (or lack thereof) of OpenOffice.org. Three weeks ago, I was sent a tweet opining about one user’s issue with using OOo for Macintosh and how their version froze and other problems.
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Posted in OpenOffice Wednesday
