Open Office Help

OpenOffice at Norris Schools
Open Office is a free alternative Office Suite (Developed by Sun Micro,) that has very similar functionality to the Microsoft Office Suite. Just like any change, there will be some frustrations as well as some pleasant changes and new features.

Open Office Writer will open up Microsoft Word files. (It also allows you to save them to the Microsoft .doc format)
Open Office Calc will open up Excel files. (It also allows you to save them to the Microsoft .xls format)
Open Office Presentation will open up PowerPoint files. (It also allows you to save them to the Microsoft .ppt format)
Open Office Drawing is a possible alternative to Microsoft Publisher.
Open Office data base is their Microsoft Access Alternative.

Once installed on your computer it will be available on the start menu under the OpenOffice folder.
As you may notice above, when you double click a Excel, PowerPoint or Word file it will just automatically open in OpenOffice.

If you want to get a head start on this, you may want to download OpenOffice at home. It's free, and will give you a chance to see what it is like first hand.

PDF add-in. Allows you to open and edit PDF files with OpenOffice.
Template Changer. Allows you to change templates on documents.
Writers Tools. Adds a lot of writing tools and features.
OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs - export & import to Google Docs
Professional Template Pack II - English - Adds some nice templates
OOoFormulaEditor is a StarBasic formula editor plug-in for OpenOffice.org Writer. Create complex formulas with OOoFormulaEditor!
Tabbed Windows Fancy a tabbed window just like your Firefox browser? This extension allows you to do so. It groups all your document window into tab. Instead of opening many OpenOffice windows, you now have only one window with document tabs.
Pagination This is a simple, but useful macros that allows you to add page number easily to a page in the way that you want it to be.

This information is from Bob Vogt, our resident Equation Expert. (Thanks Bob!):

To whom it may concern (math and science teachers, formula and equation makers for Open Office, geeks, dweebs, nerds)

Go to the website listed below and you will find a way to type in some of the more complicated formulas and equations in Open Office; i.e. fractions, square roots, powers, integration, summation, special symbols, etc.

Example: In Open Office Impress, if you want your text to be white, type color white before the text and include all of the text in braces { } ... No braces means it will only change the color until the next space.

Not quite like Microsoft Office, but once you get the hang of it and find your most used formula "bits", it really doesn't look like it will be too difficult. But, this is coming from a teacher that just worked on it for 10 minutes, so what the heck do I know.

So, if you find better and easier OR if you find problems, please let the rest of us know what we can and cannot do with this new and EXCITING weapon of math construction.

This information is from Arnold Talero, our second resident Equation Expert. (Thanks Arnold!):

Insert=>Object=>OLE Objects=>Further Objects=>MS Equation 3.0

A few questions??

Can I still use the Office program that I borrowed from the district and installed on my home computer?
Answer: No. This agreement as well as the right for home use will expire March 1st. If you keep the software installed after that date, you could be facing legal action from Microsoft. Consider this your warning and official announcement to un-install the software at home or where ever you installed it. (Laptop, etc...)

How soon will Office be removed from my computer?
Answer: This may take use several months, but we will slowly be re-imaging systems in the district. (We just completed the Elem. computer lab and the HS conference room lab. Those new images, did not include Microsoft Office, but did include Open Office.) We will not start removing Office from staff computers for several weeks, but after that... it could happen any time. We need to get the Office applications removed by March 1st, so we will start soon.

Can you skip mine right now and come back tomorrow when I am finished doing my printing from Word?
Answer; No. because we do have a deadline with hundreds of machines to do, so when we stop in your room we will be their to do the image and complete the task. You may want to have a plan B for your projector/computer lesson because it may be untimely when we do arrive. (We apologize in advance.)

How can you sit in your Ivory Tower and let something like this happen?
Answer: Well, I look around and it is far from Ivory... but.... as one of my favorite saying goes..... "We are eating our own dog food". As Dr. Skretta mentioned he has been using it for almost 2 month now and has really seen no reason to go back. All of the administrative team including Jim and myself have been using it, and have came to the same conclusion. Yes, change is never fun... But with technology that is the only constant. (Most of our kids today have never owned a record or maybe even a cassette tape for that matter.) I am glad that I work in a district where our leader and building leaders tried the technology first before just making a blanket decision. ... and they will be using the same program that the rest of us are. It was not... "Well lets deploy OpenOffice to the staff and students, but let's keep Microsoft Office for us.

We also want to thank the other staff members that were willing to try OpenOffice the last several weeks and provide us with feedback as well as be early adopters.

Oh wait, OpenOffice is OK for my neighbor... BUT I NEED IT because I do some special things with office. Can you just keep it on my machine?
Answer? No. This is an all or nothing thing and the nothing means no office. Sorry. (Licensing is based on a per-install basis.)

I noticed above that Microsoft Publisher looked like it would not just magically open with one of the OpenOffice programs??? I hope that is not the case!!
Answer: Well there is a little bad news..... and Jim's advice over the past 10 years... "Do not use Publisher" comes back to haunt us. There is no other program out in the market that will open up Microsoft Publisher documents and that is the case with OpenOffice as well.

So with this bad new with Publisher what can we do?
Answer: We are planning on purchasing a handful of Publisher licenses and installing them on a few machines in the elementary media center. This will allow staff to at least access those files and work on converting them into a OpenOffice draw format. It looks like opening up the Publisher document and then doing a copy and paste into an OpenOffice draw seems to work. This is not a great solution, but may be a good work around.

I have tried the program and 95% of it is fine, but there is one feature that I used in Office that is not here. What can I do. I want my Office back!
Answer: Have you Googled your problem? If not, why did you even ask? (Just kidding.) I am guessing you are not alone and there may be a work around or add-in that will fix your problem. Just go to Google and type in a description of the problem to see if others are experiencing the same issue. OpenOffice, just like Google Chrome, Firefox and others.... have some great add-ins and extensions that may solve your problem or fill your needs.
What about Microsoft FrontPage and my web site? Should I just delete my site now?
NO.... Microsoft Frontpage will still be on the systems, as well as the SharePoint Designer 2007 program. Microsoft's SharePoint Designer replaced FrontPage and Microsoft is giving away this program, so anyone can download it from their web site. (It looks and feels the same as FrontPage.) So, do not delete your web site.

What's the story with Publisher again, and what can I do to convert or use those files???
Since no program will open Publisher files, they will need to be converted. Publisher will be gone, but we will keep a couple copies loaded on a couple machines in the media centers. This will allow staff to at least open the file in case they missed getting them converted.

And if you listened to Jim over the years and avoided Publisher.... Then you will be just like the MS and one of the Elem. staff members that said: and I quote........ "I don't use publisher - so I think all my files (word and powerpoint) will still open with the new system. Bring it on!"

How can I convert them? Well the best solution we have found so far is to open the file in Publisher and then save it as a PDF file. Then in Open Office, open the file in Draw. This seems to work pretty well. Remember after you make your changes, save them as an Open Office Drawing.

Will we still have Movie Maker and PhotoStory?
Yes, MovieMaker and PhotoStory are a part of Windows XP (The operating system we still use.) So they will still be on the machine.
You might note that Windows 7 (The new operating system.) does not include either of these programs, which is to bad because i like them.

How long do we have to transfer all Word/PowerPoint/Excel documents into the new format? For example, if you show up in 5 minutes to switch my computer, is all that other stuff just gone? Or can we open a Word document into Open Office, w/out Word on our computer? Make any sense?
We will be starting on staff machines in a couple weeks. Once your machien is done, there will still be a few stragglers that you can use to still open files in Microsoft Office. Most machines will have Office removed no later than the end of March. (This is a huge job, so it will take us some time.)
No files will be deleted... So you will not lose any files. Your Word, Excel, and PowerPoints will automatically open in the OpenOffice program. So when you double click them, they open up with OpenOffice.

So, we could open current power points w/ a section of open office, but will we (and the kids) be able to make them in open office?
OpenOffice is a Office Suite similar to Microsoft Office. Yes, you can make documents with it.

We have a database in Microsoft Access so has anyone done much experimenting with moving those files over to the OpenOffice database?
Not yet. There are about 4-5 people that use Access in the district, and I have not had a chance to play around with the database feature in OpenOffice yet. Sorry, but hopefully we can look at it sometime soon.

I tried downloading Open Office by using your link, and it keeps giving me an error page. I'll keep trying but any thoughts on that?
Do not download it from here. It will not work. We block program downloads. It will be installed when we image your computer.
To download at home, just visit the http://www.openoffice.org/ web site.

There are a couple pluses when you get your machine imaged...
For those of you that did not load the Chrome Web Browser, it will be on the new image. (So eventually all lab machines will have chrome for students to use.)
There will also be some new photo and video tools, as well as a few new freeware software programs.

I have most of my lessons on Power Point. Last night we downloaded Open Office to our home computer. One of the things that I noticed is that my embedded video clips would not play. Will these embedded clips work in Open Office?
Answer: Yes and no. No without any changes. yes, if you convert the video to an FLV format and then embed the video. Or you can just put a hyperlink to that video's location. (Although the hyperlink would be just a link and not embeded. It would open up the video player outside of the presentation program and into a video player.) To convert videos to flash video format, you can use several programs, but the one from DVDVideosoft.com seems to work great. At school it should already be on your start menu. If not, you can install it. It is on the O drive in the folder called You_tube_vid_info and is called FreeStudio.exe