150 Open Office help topics with screencasts

Copied from our new blog location

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

Plan-B grows to 100+ screencasts

Read on our new blog location:

* Plan-B for OpenOffice.org grows to 100+ screencasts; progress for non technical users.
* Save the forrest, how big the MS OOXML spec really is.

OpenOffice.org 2.2 released

Read the story at this blog's new home.

OpenOffice.org 2.2 released

Good bye Blogger, Welcome Wordpress

I have struggled for a few month to post here. It happened after I moved to the new Blogger. It insisted that my URL's included invalid characters. Which really could not be, as I did copy them straight from the browser.

This inability to post cause a gap in my blogging journey while I had to set up the blog to continue from here.

So please be my guest and follow me to the new site. You can also pick up the RSS for the Plan-B for Software Documentation Blog.

Coffee with Michael - "Authentic Voice"

I just received a nice New Year's surprise gift (I'm still struggling with writing '07 dates).

Michael Katz, a local e-newsletter marketing consultant, just published the recording of his audio seminar - "FINDING (AND USING) YOUR AUTHENTIC VOICE". He usually sells his recordings, but decided to make it a free download this month.

Michael has a really authentic voice in e-newsletter marketing and he teaches his clients to be themselves in their writing. He has started a series of "Coffee with Michael". This month he invited Lissa Bergin-Boles, a life coach from Toronto. I trust him to know something about this topic.

If you got 20 minutes and are interested in finding your authentic voice and using it in newsletters, articles or blogs, listen in.

Need Fuzzi Math?

Are you in need of Fuzzy math. I do not mean the political rhetoric, but rather the mathematical concept of fuzzy logic and fuzzy math.

Now you can calculate with fuzzy math in OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheets, thanks to the new InrecoLAN FuzzyMath component.

The component allows to use uncertain or approximate values in OpenOffice.org Calc. It means you can perform ordinary arithmetic operations and use ordinary mathematical and financial functions with uncertain values as if they are standard, or crisp, numbers. The component allows you to create and edit fuzzy numbers, use fuzzy numbers in formulas. You can also display the graphs from the fuzzy numbers and results of calculations.

Fuzzy math has strong mathematical basis. This component enhances all mathematical and financial OpenOffice.org Calc functions for which fuzziness might be reasonable.

InrecoLAN FuzzyMath is distributed under GNU General Public Licese (GPL). Source code and the newest versions of the component are available at SourceForge.

Learn more about it at www.openfuzzymath.org.

New OpenOffice.org tutorials

ZDNet blogger Dana Blankenhorn points to new tutorials for OpenOffice.org by InPics.

While the tutorials are basic they are certainly helpful. Interesting is that Dana reports these have been made available with funding from the US Department of Education.