Linux® for Dummies®, 9th Edition

Chapter 12. Word Processing and More with OpenOffice.org

In This Chapter

• Installing the OpenOffice.org suite

• Word processing with OpenOffice.org Writer

• "Spreadsheeting" with OpenOffice.org Calc

• Presenting with OpenOffice.org Impress

• Drawing with OpenOffice.org Draw

• Managing data with OpenOffice.org Base

• Formulating with OpenOffice.org Math

	Words fly, writing remains.
	--Spanish proverb, from Dictionary of Proverbs, by Delfín Carbonell Basset

These days, just about everyone who has a computer has at least one office suite at their fingertips. If they're Microsoft Windows users, this suite is probably Microsoft Office, although it may be another worthy contender, such as Corel WordPerfect Office. In Linux, typically the suite is www.OpenOffice.org. This suite comes with Base (database), Calc (a spreadsheet), Draw (diagrams and figures), Impress (for presentations), Math (a word processor for writing mathematical formulas), and Writer (for word processing).

After you figure out how to use one of the programs in this suite, you may be happy to find that the others are designed to look and work in very similar ways. You can even open and save files in Microsoft Office format, if you need to share them with people who are using that product — and you can edit the Office files people send you, too.

That's enough about OpenOffice.org. In this chapter, you can actually use it!

Tip

Other office suites available for Linux users are the commercial OpenOffice.org-relative StarOffice (www.sun.com/staroffice ...