OpenOffice

For General Users

Several freely downloadable or commercially available derivatives of OpenOffice are now available:

1. freely downloadable
   • LibreOffice http://www.libreoffice.org/
   • Apache OpenOffice http://www.openoffice.org/
     • now (again) available for Mac OSX
2. (no longer) sold commercially
   • IBM Smartsuite

All use the same document format and can import/export a range of documents as well

• PDF
• DOC & dotDOCX documents
• XLS
• PPT.

Documentation

• comprhensive editing help is available via the HELP menu within openoffice variants
• LibreOffice additionally provide a conventional user guides that may be downloaded in dotODT or dotPDF format

http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/documentation/

Spreadsheet users having an extensive bank of, or needing to routinely interchange, Excel spreadsheets should be aware of the syntax and paradigm differences explained in:

https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/UserGuide/Migration_Guide/Calc_and_Excel

Some operations behave differently in other modules, without affecting the display of documents or presentations. See

https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOoAuthors_User_Manual/Migration_Guide/General_Differences

LibreOffice

A major upgrade to version 5 was released in late 2015.

• significant change in menu structures
• conversion guide available from above documentation repository

Configuration

Many settings can be set/changed via:

-> Tools -> Options

If many documents will be interchanged with people who don't use OpenOffice then default format for saving can be set via

-> Load/Save -> General

• then select the document format for text, spreadsheet etc docs