Re: getting started with OOo

[Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>]

Quoting Sean Hower <hokumhome -at- freehomepage -dot- com>:

> I want to start using OOo. I've got the install file, the install guide, and
> some templates that looked interesting/useful. Is there anything else I
> should get or that any of you have found useful? I've never used OOo before,
> but I'm pretty good with MS Office. 
> 

You might look around the www.openoffice.org site for FAQs and how-tos. Also, 
if you do a search, you should be able to find a PDF of the manual for 
StarOffice, which is OOo's commercial version.

A few pieces of advice:

- Learn what you do with the Navigator and the Stylist. They're both very 
powerful and very useful.

- Have a good look at styles. In Writer, you'll find styles not only for 
paragraphs and characters, but also for frames, lists, and pages. You'll find 
styles in other applications, too, where the MS Office equivalents don't have 
them.

- Have a look at Tools > Outline Numbering. This tool is actually much more 
than the name implies: it also determines the styles that appear in the 
Navigator, ToCs, and some fields. If you like outlining, one little trick is to 
add the Text Body style to the outline levels, so that it appears in the 
Navigator.

In the book I'm writing on OOo, I have an early chapter that includes a section 
on both the logic and the illogic of OOo, but since that is all part of my plan 
to retire early and rich, I think that these are places to start exploring.

Good luck,



-- 
Bruce Byfield bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com 604-421.7177