If you want to fly with OpenOffice 3.0, publish to your local wiki, create web presentations, or add maps to your documents, Beginning OpenOffice 3 is the book for you. You will arm yourself with new OpenOffice.org 3.0 tools, from creating wiki docs to automating complex design steps. OpenOffice has been downloaded almost 100 million times, and this is the book that explains why.

• You learn how to adopt OpenOffice 3.0 innovations.

• You see how to work across Windows, OS X, Google, and the Web, no matter what the format.

• Mail merges and wiki docs will never seem so simple.

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Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 7 Ratings

Delivers exactly what it promises - 2009-03-28
Reviewer Rating:
Beginning OpenOffice 3 walks the reader through using the most common features of OpenOffice, arguably one of the most powerful and complete office suite available. And best of all, it is free! Many companies and individuals are discovering it for the first time as they deal with the need to exchange files with others who are using the newest version of Microsoft Office. Given the choice of upgrading all their systems to the newest version or simply downloading OpenOffice 3, many are examining it as a viable option. OpenOffice 3 can open and edit files created with the newest version of Word and save them in a format the Microsoft Office can open and use.

This brings us to the purpose of this book. How do you find out how to use the features to achieve the results you want? One of the best things about this book is the approach the author uses. The entire book is project oriented so you learn by creating projects and solving problems in a real world scenario. The book covers all the different software components - word processing, spreadsheet, database, illustration, and presentation software. The author does an excellent job of focusing on and detailing the most common needs of a typical office. You can literally start from no knowledge of office suite software at all and learn how to become a proficient user in relatively short order.

The chapter on the word processing module starts from the very basics of opening a file or creating a new one. From there the author leads the reader through formatting, creating and using templates, paragraph styles and other common needs. Then he moves the reader through creating a newsletter, inserting graphics, word wrap, changing styles in a page and other advanced topics. This section ends with understanding how to automatically create footnotes, endnotes, table of contents and style sheets.

The section on the spreadsheet module covers creating a spreadsheet, adding formulas, linking formulas to other cells, and multiple other common tasks. In addition it covers creating charts and graphs and making them easy to understand. The chapters on the presentation and illustration programs are much shorter but the programs are much less complex by design. Presentation software needs to be able to create a slide show, change slides on a predetermined time scale, and add bulleted points and other basic actions needed to provide a solid presentation. The illustration module also is designed to create or edit items for inclusion in newsletters or other publishing needs. It is basically somewhat more powerful than paint but much less than Adobe or similar illustration packages.

The database module is covered well with enough detail to learn how to use it but not so much as to get the reader lost in multiple foreign key linking and the like. The author does a very good job of explaining the use of multiple tables and linking them for efficient database creation. He also covers the creation of input forms, queries, and reports and other functional requirements of database management.

Once you have a basic understanding of the different modules the second section of the book involves putting them all together to share content by building a web page with a database, ability to input information over the web and create queries and reports via the web browser.

The writing is concise while still being detailed enough to provide highly functional information. Using it I was able to create a complete web based database for the processing of financial information for grant requests for a local foundation. Granted I already had an extensive understanding of most of these areas but it was quick and easy to build it based on information supplied in the book.

Beginning OpenOffice 3 is highly recommended to anyone interested in learning how to use this powerful office suite.

Before you buy consider this. - 2009-07-24
Reviewer Rating:
I would strongly urged anyone who wants to use OpenOffice to first check the freely available "Getting Stated Guides" on [...]

I found these to be much more complete than this book which provide only limited information by example. I found this is just as easy to grasp as well.

Save yourself some money and learn more with these free guides. At least check them out and decided for yourself.

Great Reference Tool - 2009-05-05
Reviewer Rating:
This book is a great reference tool for anyone starting to learn Open Office. Book is written clear, and straight forward. You can easily highlight or tab section for future use. This book is written better than the "dummies" book for Open Office. This reference book will allow me to do some freelance work.

Finally, a good book for OpenOffice - 2009-09-13
Reviewer Rating:
I'm very happy with the purchase. I'm new to OpenOffice but I really love it! I hope to see more books for open source programs, especially programs that rival Microsoft products. Thanks.

Beginning OpenOffice 3 - 2009-08-07
Reviewer Rating:
Beginning OpenOffice 3 is just the right tone for those who are one step above "Dummies". It is complete and comprehensive for each of the OpenOffice 3 applications.

At times the narrative gets to be very technical and, unless you are active in the Office Suite products you get pretty much lost.

Although the products in OpenOffice 3 are remarkedly similar to the Windows Office, that comparison is not made in this book. It lets the user know how to execute in OpenOffice 3, not compare the good and/or bad methods of OpenOffice to Office.

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