Customer Reviews

OpenOffice.Org 1.0 Resource Kit

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With Microsoft about to make another snatch at your wallet with its release of MS Office 2003, it's more than ever worth knowing that you don't have to succumb, you don't have to shell out the $149-$499 Bill Gates plans to charge you in order to maintain the 76% profit margin he earns on the sale of his software suite. You can, instead, order The OpenOffice.Org 1.0 Resource Kit for $28 and receive a superb office suite, complete with a well-written 1,000-page manual that covers all of the integrated programs. Or, if you have broadband, you can go straight to the web site in the title and download the entire suite for free!

I discovered the OpenOffice.org software about a month ago and downloaded it on my office computer. My professional responsibilities call for heavy use of a word processor and light use of a spread sheet. I was able to download, install, and run OpenOffice.org without a hitch and found that these two functions, at least, are superb replacements for the MS Office software I had been using. Since my home computer has only a dial-up line, I ordered The OpenOffice.Org 1.0 Resource Kit for that and again had perfect success loading the suite from the included CD-ROM. I recommend the latter approach, in fact, even if you do have broadband, since the thorough, lucid manual will allow you, in short order, to make fuller use of the software than before. I am myself, for example, making much better use of the OpenOffice.org spread sheet than I ever made of Excel because of the detailed instructions in the manual.

The software and the manual have both made a believer of me. OpenOffice.org seems to me the most usable software yet to come out of the "open source" movement (I have hopes for Linux but they haven't yet been fulfilled). I have used OpenOffice.org to open and revise MS Word documents and Excel spread sheets and to save them in both the compact, efficient XML file format and the baggier MS Office format for the use of colleagues. As a private user in a professional setting, I have been completely satisfied with this software and guide. As a result, it gives me great pleasure these days to look at Bill Gates' absurd prices for his now-obsolete product and to know that this is money I never need to give him again. So if you're looking for a complete, full-featured suite of the common office programs, you have a choice: You can spend less than $30 for this book and CD-ROM, or you can spend hundreds for MS Office. My advice: spend the $30, keep the hundreds.

I bought ten of these kits for the people in my office, since we're switching the local rec center over to OOo. I really like it. It's one-stop shopping for the book and CD, and it's got a good range of information for the sysadmin (me) as well as people who are just running some spreadsheets. I heartily recommend the troubleshooting section of the install chapter. I also sat down my users and ran them through the tutorials in the book, and they're getting going with the product pretty well, esp considering they're not real intense computer people. It's a pretty fun book too, easy to understand without having to interpret.

This is a really good price. My own opinion is, nobody should be bothering to get the StarOffice product anymore, unless they're a huge business and really want support. StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are virtually the same (just some missing templates basically). This resource kit is really the best choice if you're looking to get something beyond a free Openoffice.org download and trying to figure it out on your own. There's a lot of docs on the openoffice site but wrangling them all together and finding what you need can take some time. The book index is good so you can find stuff pretty easily.

I've used Haugland's StarOffice book, which is also excellent, at a previous job, and the OpenOffice book you get with this is quite similar. So just a note, if you already have the Staroffice 6.0 Companion, you don't need this book, but when you're telling your friends to ditch Microsoft, tell them to just get the OpenOffice resource kit and they'll be good to go.

Knowing that it's mostly intelligent, clear-thinking people who will be willing to venture outside the for-your-own-good totalitarianism of Microsoftland, the authoress efficiently plots you a straight-line course to mastery of the product. She doesn't waste your time telling you where to find the File menu, or, at the other extreme, how to parse the source code. Her revivifying doses of occasional wit are actually amusing - unlike the Borscht Belt shtick found in the "For Dummies" volumes. And there's no bullstuff either. One section is aptly titled "How To Turn Off Annoying Features". And when she finds the DirectCursor feature more of a menace than an asset, she tells you in plain words to avoid it. Even the page layouts are refreshingly sane and uncluttered. I'm actually reading the thing cover-to-cover, believe it or not.

Best computer instruction book ever?

If you have discovered the freedom, flexibility and cost-savings of open source software--namely, OpenOffice.org's office suite, then your next purchase should be this book. There is documentation on the web but who wants to go searching for answers when you can have a printed resource within arm's reach.

This tome covers all of the component programs in the suite and turns over every stone to deliver to you all of the info needed to become proficient--or attain power-user status. It's up to you!

After you download or purchase the low-cost CDs of this otherwise free, open source program, buy this book. It's simply a natural extension of the office suite!

Here's to saving money for all of us! Cheers!

I met Solveig at Comdex this week and was very happy to see that she's written a book for OpenOffice.org. I've been making some progress learning the program on my own but it is clear already that I was doing it the hard way. Already since getting the book I have learned how to do repeating headings on spreadsheets, complex running headers in Writer files, and hyperlinked TOC entries. I have found everything I looked for. I think it's a good idea for any OpenOffice.org user to get the Resource Kit. You've already saved a lot of money on the software, and this book is worth every penny.

My company is changing us over from Microsoft to OpenOffice and they let us get some of these books to help out learning the program. I like the book a lot since it's easy to find what I want to know and easy to understand it. It's also good when you think something's kind of odd in the software since it says yeah, it's weird but this is how it works.

The OpenOffice.org Resource Kit book is an outstanding reference to the OpenOffice.org suite. We have been using OpenOffice.org at our organization for some months now, but we were not aware of many of the features available. This book is a really first-rate source of information on ALL of the tools that are available in the software.

Not only does the book cover the word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software, but also the drawing and image editing tool, ODBC database access, the HTML editor, and other less-used features.

Recommended.

I used this book heavily during our transition from Word to OpenOffice.org, and found it to be extremely valuable. Our IT manager and I have used it as a guide to installing the program and setting it up, and to train our users on the product.

We have been transitioning slowly so have installations of 1.0.1, 1.0.3 and 1.1. The book covers how to use each very well. I would strongly advise anyone transitioning to any version of OpenOffice.org to purchase this book. I believe our transition from Word to OpenOffice.org went more smoothly than the transition from WordPerfect to Word several years ago.

I would also recommend that anyone transitioning to OpenOffice.org investigate the other web sites with free documentation available from the software's web site.

I wanted to make a PowerPoint presentation without buying the software from Microsoft. Some pieces of information I needed for using the OpenOffice.org "Presentation" software were not in this book. Some I had to figure out by myself. That was a very frustrating and confusing process. Finally, I turned to the on-line OpenOffice.org user's forum and got what I needed. The authors admit terminology in the book is not consistent because materials have been contributed by many authors. That can cause problems.

The book comes with an early version of the OpenOffice.org software. Currently newer software with more features is available for free download. The usefulness of the disk that comes with the book is now limited, unless one wants to use the earlier version of the software, but that misses some nice features, like easy conversion of a text document to the PDF format.

Still, the book probably was a help to me. I did finally get my PowerPoint presentation made.

Open source software is one of the best things to come along since, well, the proverbial sliced bread. OpenOffice is among the best of the breed, and a fine example of collaborative international goodwill. I use its Writer features almost exclusively for composing and editing articles which are passed back and forth between users of Microsoft Word. No problems. And considering the cost of Word, it feels almost sinful to get OpenOffice and subsequent revisions for a modest donation.

Online help for most software is good up to a point, but the information tends to be scattered and hunting up the answer to a question on the screen can be frustrating and fragmentary. "OpenOffice 1.0 Resource Kit" is a comprehensive solution. It covers the earlier version of the software, and may be hard to find. Besides, if you have upgraded to the latest software (3.0), you should get the appropriate manual, [...] (a slimmer, less complete offering).