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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Learn to live without Microsoft Office..., August 27, 2005
This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself OpenOffice.org 2, Firefox and Thunderbird for Windows All in One (Paperback)
The software trio that Microsoft would love to vaporize... OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and Thunderbird. High quality software, easy to use if you already know the Microsoft equivalents, and best of all... FREE! Greg Perry has written a book that will get you up to speed quite well on it all... OpenOffice.org 2, Firefox, and Thunderbird for Windows All in One (Sams Teach Yourself).
Contents:
Part 1 - Writing Words with Writer: Start Here; Learning Writer's Basics; Making Your Words Look Good; Adding Lists, Tables, and Graphics; Using Writer's Advanced Features
Part 2 - Crunching Numbers with Calc: Getting to Know Calc; Working with Calc Data; Formatting Spreadsheets with Calc; Creating Advanced Spreadsheets; Using Calc as a Simple Database
Part 3 - Impressing Audiences with Impress: Learning About Impress; Adding Flair to Your Presentations; Making More Impressive Presentations
Part 4 - Drawing On Your Inner Artist with Draw: Getting Ready to Draw; Improving Your Drawings; Putting on Finishing Touches with Draw
Part 5 - Enhancing Your Work with OpenOffice.org's Other Features: Enhancing Your Work with More OpenOffice.org Features; Organizing Your Data with Base; Browsing the Internet with Firefox; Emailing with Thunderbird
Index
Overall, I think this book is very well done. The style is such that each chapter has a number of items (all numbered and listed in the table of contents) that focus on a particular task, such as formatting a table or inserting graphics in a document. These items are cross-referenced back to items you need to know/do before you start, as well as to items that will build on your new skills. As a result, the book works well as both a tutorial and a reference guide that you can use once you master the basics. The instructions are easy to follow, and pretty much 95% (or more) of what you'll need to do on a regular basis is covered. If someone were looking to use OpenOffice.org as their primary productivity suite instead of Microsoft Office, this would be a good book to pick up as your introduction.
My only nit about the book is the inclusion of the Firefox and Thunderbird chapters. The way it's presented makes it look like Firefox and Thunderbird are part of OpenOffice.org. They're not. And if you're buying the book for some significant coverage on those two packages, you'll be really disappointed. In the 600 pages of this book, you'll get around 50 pages to cover both. It's almost as if the topics were included in order to ride some of the current Firefox popularity. In my opinion (and it's simply that... my opinion), I would have either left those chapters out entirely or expanded them significantly. If you're wanting to know more about either Firefox or Thunderbird, you'd be much better off buying a separate book that *just* covers that.
Even with the criticism, the book is well worth having. You'll learn how to cut your dependancies on Microsoft's Office monopoly and save yourself quite a bit of money in the process...
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
interoperable with Microsoft Office, August 31, 2005
This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself OpenOffice.org 2, Firefox and Thunderbird for Windows All in One (Paperback)
How useful is OpenOffice? Can it really replace Microsoft Office for some of you? These are the key questions that the book addresses. Many more people use Microsoft Office than OpenOffice. And if you are one of those, you've probably built up an expertise in it. Plus, you have files written in those formats. How easy is it to migrate?
Perry deals with this at great length. He goes through each program in OpenOffice. Explaining how to use it, assuming no prior knowledge on your part. The most important of which is probably Writer. In an office environment, that is what most of us do. Perry reassures you that OpenOffice understands the Microsoft file formats for Word, Excel, PointPoint or Access. More than anything else in the book, you need to appreciate that you are not giving up much (if anything) by moving to OpenOffice. You can still read those legacy files, and you can write documents in those formats and send to others using Microsoft Office.
Interoperability is a key virtue here.
Now as for the OpenOffice programs, they are no more difficult to learn than their Microsoft counterparts. Serious sweat has gone into making them as intuitive and powerful as possible. All the common operations that you might expect in a word processing program or spreadsheet are here.
Note that OpenOffice does not guarantee an exact functional mapping from Microsoft Office. So there are indeed steps you can do in the latter that are not possible in the former. But for most users, these should be uncommon operations.
The book and its CD also cover Firefox and Thunderbird. But more as an afterthought. While the coverage is well written, it tends to be less detailed than about OpenOffice itself. I somewhat agree with the previous reviewer, who considered these to be a bit of an add on to the book. Nonetheless, it was competently done by Perry.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very helpful introduction to OO., March 12, 2007
This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself OpenOffice.org 2, Firefox and Thunderbird for Windows All in One (Paperback)
As other reviewers have suggested, the 'hype' you read about the Open Office suite is actually true. Especially in regard to sharing files with M$ Office suite. I have successfully passed spreadsheets and documents back and forth between the two without much of a hitch. As stated in other reviews, and in the book, there are differences in how some things are done, and actual capabilities of each of the two suites, but using the book will help immensely in recognizing and dealing with the issues (which, for the most part are minor). The only problem I've had with OO is one of these issues. I inserted a table with three narrow columns and over 200 rows into a designated section of a document. Then I set that section to flow that table into three columns, to save pages. However, whenever I edited the doc after that, I'd have to reformat the section, because it put the column breaks in odd places. MSWord doesn't have a problem handling the same document. I expect this little bug will be dealt with soon...another advantage of using opne source software! Congrats to Mr. Perry on a well written introduction to what I suspect will be the biggest threat to M$ yet.
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