Erwin's StarOffice Tango

Erwin's StarOffice Tango
Erwin Tenhumberg's Insights into Open Source and Dancing
... or why Open Competition matters

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Freitag März 18, 2005

Looking for some Blender guys
A few weeks ago I thought about ways how one could make the OpenOffice.org software bettern know to the world. I was looking for some guerilla marketing techniques to get the word out without having to spend thousands of dollars which the OpenOffice.org project doesn't have. What came to my mind was "Inside Jack". If you don't know who Jack is, just watch the episodes one, two, and three.

Cristian Driga who is a key driver of the OpenOffice.org Art project mentioned Blender in one of his messages. I just checked out the home page and the movie gallery and I'm impressed what you can do with the software.

Unfortunately I'm not very good at drawing cartoon characters. Therefore, I'm looking for some Blender guys who can help me to create some funny OpenOffice.org stories that will get circulated and distributed simply because it is fun to watch them.

The OpenOffice.org project cannot offer money or a cool prize, but the millions of OpenOffice.org users might be able to make someone famous.

If you read this and want to help with this effort, just join the art project on OpenOffice.org. See you there!
( Mrz 18 2005, 12:34:56 PM CET ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Cool Sun Ray success story
The new issue of "Sun News Today" (video) talks about a cool Sun Ray success story in Paderborn, German. Here is the link:
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/video/sunnewstoday.html
( Mrz 18 2005, 12:28:52 PM CET ) Permalink

Just switch! - Nested Tables in StarOffice 8
One new StarOffice 8 feature that some people might find useful is the support for nested tables in Writer. Via the "Table" menu or the table button it is very simple to create a table.

There are two different ways to create tables within tables. Since the two approaches lead to different results, I want to briefly explain them here. Either ...

... place the cursor into an empty table field, ...

... press the mouse button over the table button, keep it pressed, drag the mouse poiter until the desired table size is selected ...

... release the mouse button and see the result:

..., or enter a few lines of text separated by ENTER, select the text, ...

... click the table button (just click, i.e. release the mouse button immediately), ...

... and have as many table fields added as there were lines of text.

With the second approach no extra empty lines stay in addition to the embedded table. Here is a larger example:

And again with the "View - Nonprinting Characters" option switched off:

( Mrz 18 2005, 11:23:35 AM CET ) Permalink