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Plan-B for OpenOffice.org celebrates fast expansion of its help topics supported by screencasts.

Within the last two weeks, we were able to grow the number of screencasts by 50%. Most new screencasts deal with paragraph formatting.

Some of the new additions to OOo writer documentation are:

• Define space above paragraphs


• Define space below paragraphs


• Keep lines together in a paragraph or keep paragraphs together on a page
  


• Also control orphan paragraphs and widow paragraphs

If you like fancy document formatting then you need to check out how to create drop cap letters at the beginning of a paragraph.

Other recent topics on the new blog:

• Open standard bills defeated in 6 states


• OOo 2.3 will improve memory footprint


• OpenOffice.org converts presentations to HTML


• WebConferencing software supports OpenOffice.org


• Interoprability between different office suites

The OpenOffice.org development team is hard at work to make its office productivity suite better than ever.

Bruce Byfield reviews an OpenOffice.org milestone release and particularly its charting component. Although the component is not yet scheduled for any release date, Bruce does describe in detail the many changes and enhancements of the chart wizard for OpenOffice.org Calc. I guess it will be far into 2007 before we see the fruits of this work.

I have recently reported on the new OpenOffice.org chart module and its improvements. Looks like Linux.com has also noticed the ongoing development of better charts for Calc. They have some nice screen shots of the chart preview, the ability to add regression curves, and the new flexible data ranges.

Unfortunately, they confirm the uncertain release schedule.

Switching to OpenOffice.org could save the Danish government $21 million over an upgrade to Office 2007. This is the conclusion of a study conducted by Ramboll Management an IT consultancy. The report was commissioned by the Danish Open Source Business Association.

The Danish Parliament decided on June 2 that starting 2008 all documents exchanged with its citizens must be based on open standard file formats. The report compares the two options of upgrading to Microsoft Office 2007 with OpenXML and OpenOffice with the OpenDocument Format (also known as ISO 26300 standard).

The report looks at the cost over five years, including training and file conversion. The report concludes that on a strict cost basis, sticking with installed Offixe XP and Office 2003 and using a plug-in to load and save ODF documents would be the least expensive option. However, switching to OpenOffice, which uses ODF as its native file format, is little more costly. While upgrading to MS Office 2007 would cost additional $21 million.

It appears the next minor release is a bit delayed. According to the roadmap the next minor release with bug fixes and smaller improvements was planned for September.

However, apparently release candidate 3 of the release does turn some heads with its improvements in speed. Some beta testers can't but rave about its quick startup time.

Sounds rather good to me. I can't wait.

Apparently speed is a major concern for the development team of OpenOffice.org. They were not satisfied with the time it takes to load large spreadsheets from Excel into OpenOffice.org Calc. So they improved Calc to load large spreadsheets faster by a factor of 15+.

When they say large spreadsheet, they mean really large, 25 megabytes, 100 sheets, 1 million cells and hundred thousand formulas. A change in the algorithm used brought down the times from ~39 minutes to 2:37 on a 1.8 MHz Pentium IV. On a Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 275 with more memory, the time reduced from ~28 minutes to 43 seconds, almost a gain of factor 40.

Unfortunately, the improvements will only be included in Release 2.1, targeted for end of the year. Hope for a nice Christmas present.

OpenOffice.org is a popular office suite. As it is open source and available for free it is very attractive to institutions that want to save some money. This is especially true for institutions of higher education, that also want to save some money for students.

How popular is OpenOffice.org at the nations colleges and universities? That question has been researched by Benjamin Horst a NY based open source advocate. If your college uses OpenOffice and it is not on the list, drop Ben a comment.

Also, Digg this story so more people read about it and we get an even better list.

Are you a musician or a music teacher? Do you have the need to write some sheet music? why not use OpenOffice.org?

Did you know there is a simplified notation for music, called LilyPond. It is a simple system to describe the notes and also a program to typeset the notes as sheet music. Thanks to Dave Philips from LinuxJournal I now know how to write sheet music with OpenOffice.org.

Dave demonstrates the use of Samual Hartman's open source project OOoLilyPond.
Sam's project is a set of macros that integrate LilyPond into OpenOffice.org and is tested with OOo 2.0.2 and 2.0.4.

Thanks Dave and Sam!

Linux Journal, has announced it 2006 Editors' choice awards. In three categories OpenOffice.org won the top choice.

OpenOpffice.org wins in the category office suite. "OpenOffice.org delivers just the right combination of openness, power and similarity to Microsoft Office that it provides the features and familiarity people want in an office suite without the drawbacks of proprietary document format or proprietary code." write the editors of Linux Journal. They also note it is by far the most popular office suite behind MS Office.

OpenOffice.org Calc wind the category spreadsheet. They write "if you're really serious about doing spreadsheet work, your best bet is with OpenOffice.org Calc." Honorable mention in this category goes to EIOffice and KSpread. Interestingly they don't mention neither Google nor other web based applications. Well they are probably not close enough to Linux.

The third category win goes to OpenOffice.org Impress as editors' choice of presentation software. They state that offering "that optimal balance of features, power and familiarity for those who want to migrate from Microsoft Office" did convince them to prefer it over KPresenter or the EIOffice presentation component.

The word processor choice went to AbiWord. Often a word processor is all one needs and AbiWord apparently does a good job in that. LinuxJounal mentions that "AbiWord has all of what most people will need in a word processor and then some, without the bloat and long load times of OpenOffice.org Writer". As LinuxJournal reviewd version 2.0.3, this category might change next year, as version OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 has much improved load times.

Congratulations to OpenOffice.org and the development team. I think these awards are well deserved.