Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club

It's things like this that remind me how much time I spent in video arcades in the eighties, and how much time I spent in meetings in the nineties:

Some big news on the OpenOffice.org front: this report from the OpenOffice.org conference held earlier this month reveals plans to integrate the MozillaThunderbird email client and Mozilla Sunbird calendaring application into the OpenOffice.org suite, and to implement a Mozilla-like extensions system to OpenOffice.org. Hopefully this means more than just additional bloat to an already heavy set of applications. If currently core components of OpenOffice.org are sliced off into optional loadable modules, it could be possible to open a particular kind of document in OpenOffice.org and only load those components necessary for working with that document type. That has the pontential to reduce loading time, system resource use, and interface clutter. This would work particularly well with modular document types like XHTML 1.1, which has been designed specifically for this kind of use. It will be nice to see development of Sunbird get an added kick, as well.

The OpenOffice.org documentation team have also launched a template/clipart competition, with some pretty nice cash incentives for contributing your designs to the community.

Just read a brilliant article explaining how to and how not to use a word processor to format your documents.  One of the reasons I hate word processors so much is that they are so badly designed that they practically demand you do things the wrong way.  This article will help you avoid creating documents that look mangled in a different word processor, or a different version of the same word processor.

I'll do my best to remember what we got up to last night, and provide links where appropriate.  Our mission was to replace as many proprietary applications as possible on Shirley and George's WinMe computer with free software equivalents.  Read on to find out how we went...

Here's a nice tutorial on turning your spreadsheets into charts using OpenOffice.org.  The author also has a whole blog devoted to OpenOffice.org tips and tricks.