Customer Reviews

OOoSwitch: 501 Things You Want to Know About Switching To OpenOffice.org from Microsoft Office

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For those of us coming from an MS world, it helps with any new software to have assistance to overcome the learning curve. OOoSwitch jumpstarts the "trial and error" learning curve methodology by showing the differences and similarities between MS Office and OpenOffice.org.

The PDF feature in OOo would be reason enough to endure the learning curve, but OOoSwitch makes the transition fairly painless. By pointing out tasks I've already mastered in MS Office, I'm becoming reasonbly proficent in OOo.

Good book for experienced MS Office users and noncomputer types.

If you know how to do a task in Word, then you can quickly look up how to do it in Write. The language is simple and easy to use. My Mother liked it so much, that she took my copy.

Few of us have time to read a guide book cover-to-cover, so it's nice to find one that's well-organized. This one is! OpenOffice.org is a new product/project that's still ironing out problems and making improvements. If you can't find what you need within this book, it also gives the website for the reader/user to ask questions and even invites their input.

I've been a unapologetic Microsoft Word fanatic since 1991. But OpenOffice 2.x got good fast, and with its adoption of the universal and ISO-certified OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF), suddenly it has the upper hand against Word 2007 -- in format, usability (yes, I said it), and power, having the ability to create documents twice the size of Word 2007. But "OOoSwitch: 501 Things You Want to Know..." demonstrates how OpenOffice can match Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and make switching a breeze. The price is steep, but surprisingly, it's worth every penny to this former Word fanboy.

Yes it does answer questions for those that are switching from MS Office. More to the point, in doing so fulfills the need for a very good "how to" for OOo.
Even though it's becoming a bit dated, there is much still relevant to todays Open Office program. We can sit around waiting for the software author's (Solveig Haugland) publisher (Prentice Hall) to see the necessity for the long anticipated OpenOffice.org 2.x Resource Kit. In the mean time this book as well as some of the other published books on the subject actually can help and do so well. The price is ridiculous even though Amazon has the best price. You might try one of the second-hand sellers with good reputations on Amazon Marketplace. READ DESCRIPTIONS, READ FEEDBACK. My free advice / open source contribution. Even with shipping you'll save.
John Row
in1ear

I liked OOoSwitch because I thought it was very readable. It is written in plain English, and gives brief, clear explanations of how to use OOo.