Help for the OpenOffice.org office suite is available in many ways. Every user who seeks some help can find a method that fits best.

• First, there is the classical installed Help. You know, just press the F1 key, or click any of the Help buttons.

  This once was called "Online Help" because it was available immediately, without any waiting time. And this is still true. By now the word "online" changed its meaning. It is used now for something that is available on the web or by e-mail. And OpenOffice.org offers a lot of online help, too.

• The web based Help has an overview page at documentation.openoffice.org. From here, links lead to the special pages, as FAQ, How-To, PDF manuals, and more. Many links go to the Wiki pages, where you can read, edit and write helpful information.

• The Wiki page at http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation presents links to the following helpful sections:

  • User Guides for OpenOffice.org 3

  • User Guides for OpenOffice.org 2

  • Frequently Asked Questions

  • SysAdmin/Developer Guides

  • Reference Lists

  • How Tos

  • Tutorials and Screencasts

• Another way to ask for Help is by e-mail. The mailing lists are "run" by other OpenOffice.org users who voluntarily spend their time and energy to answer all questions. So please ask politely and try to give all necessary information, for example, which version of OpenOffice.org you are using, and on which operation system.

  • users@openoffice.org is the main list for questions and answers

  • discuss@openoffice.org should be used for discussions about OpenOffice.org

  • dev@openoffice.org is the list to ask about developers' questions

  • An overview of the main e-mail lists is here: http://www.openoffice.org/mail_list.html

• If you want to ask your question on a web forum, where other users of the software will give their answers, browse to http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/

• And don't forget to read the pages of all the enthusiastic OpenOffice.org users on the web, who provide tutorials, how-to instructions, and much more. For example, the pages of Solveig Haugland (link in the right column of this blog) are much recommended.

• More Help is available, PDF files and printed books, tutorials, videos. Use your favorite search engine, include your search words and the word OpenOffice.org, to find the answers.

We always want to learn how we can improve the Help. If you have ideas, please subscribe to the documentation mail list at dev@documentation.openoffice.org and discuss your ideas.

Once upon a time there were some little office user. Using office all day long. Exchanging files with other little office users. In those days, only one office program was known, so sharing the files was a real no-brainer.

They all lived in a small village in the middle of Happyland. Then suddenly, from one day to the other, the sharing of files got more complicated. Some little office users had updated versions of the software, some not. Some could afford more expensive computers with yet another version of the software. Now sharing files got complicated, and for some little office users, almost impossible. When they complained, they only were told to pay more money for ever more updates. Buy new software that promised to make their own documents compliant to what they had been before. The little office users grumbled a bit, but as they did not know better, they gave in.

Until:-- one day a strong wind blew a fairy from the nearby open land into their village. It was a free fairy, and she had a magic wand that made the sound of foss, foss, fosssss, whenever she waved the wand.

Well, you kids all know for sure what a kind of free fairy that was. The villagers of Happyland gathered together and listened to the fairy's words. They learned about free and open software, and they wondered how they could have ever lived without. So this fairy story about software ends here.

Wait for more fairies to come.

And they lived happily ever after.

Use the Mouse to Zoom and Scroll

Most users of OpenOffice.org use a mouse device with a scroll wheel.

• You can turn this scroll wheel up and down to scroll the OpenOffice.org document window up and down.

  But there is more to the scroll wheel than vertically scrolling.

• Hold down the Shift key while turning the scroll wheel, and you will scroll horizontally through your document, from right to left and back.

• Hold down the Ctrl key while turning the scroll wheel to zoom the document window in and out.

The scroll wheel also acts as a third or middle mouse button. In OpenOffice.org, you can select what should happen when you press the middle mouse button:

• Choose Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org - View. Look at the Middle mouse button drop-down list.

You can choose from the three options: No function, Automatic scrolling, Paste clipboard.

When Automatic scrolling is enabled, you click the middle mouse button in a document to see a special icon. This icon looks like a compass rose with four directions. When you now move the mouse, the document scrolls in the same direction. Click any mouse button to exit this scrolling mode.

When Paste clipboard is enabled, a middle mouse click pastes the contents of the " middle mouse clipboard". This is a function that Solaris and Linux users know well, while it may be new to Windows users, where this X Window selection clipboard does not exist. It is a clipboard that always holds the text that was selected last, no matter in which window. Once that last selection gets cleared, the clipboard is cleared, too. This special clipboard lives independently from the "normal" clipboard that you use from the Edit menu or by Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, and Ctrl+X.

All these functions require a mouse device and software that supports these functions. As these functions are not OpenOffice.org functions, you will not see a description in the OpenOffice.org Help.

This text is written in English language, using a Western text input method. The text is written horizontally from left to right. This seems to be so normal. It seems to be the only right way to write text. Or not?

No. I suppose that a majority of the educated inhabitants of this planet do not write in English, and they do not use any of the Western scripts. Instead, they may be used to write in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean glyphs (CJK), or in other writing systems that are called "complex text layout languages" (CTL) by the "normal text layout" users.

Let's have a short look into Wikipedia: There are different writing systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_system

There are many of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writing_systems

You can easily get lost just by browsing those Wikipedia topics and the direct links.

So, back to OpenOffice.org. I once blogged about the many languages of OOo. In the meantime, the OOo web page that lists all the OOo languages moved to the Wiki: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Languages

Most of the current developers of OOo are living and working in countries where English language and Western script is not seen as exotic. The download numbers show that most of the current users also live there. But we do not want to exclude anyone from using OOo just because of other languages.

There is quite a long way to go for OOo to really fit the needs of all possible users in all countries of the world. The good news is that we are on our way.

The native language projects cannot be praised enough. Many volunteers offer so many hours of work and enthusiasm. Sometimes a whole language project seems to be run by only one person - and successfully!

Any user can contribute to improving their version of OOo over time. Submit issues or help resolving the issues. Provide documentation in your language. Currently, a spotlight is directed at the Arabic versions, see http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Arabization_efforts for a list of work in progress.

The real problems using alien versions of OOo are often unknown to the developers until they are reported by alien users. For example, OOo can be used to write text from right to left since many years. But only now we know that it can be a problem to embed the numbers that can be seen on Egypt car plates (they are called Western Arabic numbers) into Arabic text. The formatting automatism tends to embed those numbers as those 1234567890 numbers that are often called Arabic numbers, without the "Western". This design flaw will be fixed soon.

Another issue that came to our knowledge is that after changing the locale for your OOo Calc, you would also need to change the date and time formatting strings. For example, German users would like to use TT.MM.JJJJ (Tag, Monat, Jahr) as a format string instead of MM.DD.YYYY (Month, Day, Year) when they format the output of a Calc date function. This was possible all the time, but it was never documented because no one complained until now. The localized help would give the localized formatting code, but never a list of all the codes for all locales. (You can find the raw data at http://l10n.openoffice.org/source/browse/l10n/i18npool/source/localedata/data/  )

So we all can and will learn new things every day with OOo.

Developing software (or hardware) is more rewarding if there are many potential users, now and in the future.

It might be quite nice to develop a new light bulb that is perfectly suited for the homes of Phil and his family in Punxsutawney. But it is much better to develop a new light bulb that can illuminate all homes of the world. A developer would get more help from others on this way, and there would be a wider choice of programming tools. Not to speak of any financial rewards.

You may argue that this is not possible because of the different light bulb sockets, voltages, and other technical and legal restrictions. See? That is why we need open standards that are the same wherever possible. Even for common supplies like electricity or the dimensions of nuts and bolts it is not a simple task to agree on an open standard.

• The USA agreed to use the metric system in 1866, still it is not in common public use.

• Some efforts were successful, however. September 3rd, 1967, Sweden changed the whole car traffic from left side to right side driving. That was relatively easy back in those days. Would be more difficult today. See the huge street constructions at the former Chinese/Macau border, where traffic has to change from one side to the other without crashing into each other.

Now, back to software. Is it easy to change software standards, once that people agree something should be changed? Not really. Even when people who use expensive, suppressive, proprietary de facto standards are given the chance to switch to free alternatives (free as in beer, and free as in unrestricted use), they may decide to stick to what they have.

You can take a horse to the water but you can't make him drink. But you can try to make the water so refreshing and delicious that no horse can resist.

Enter ODF. The OpenDocument Format is an approved international standard, like the meter or the second. That means that ODF based software solutions that you develop today will be valid and useful everywhere on the world, now and forever. It is not necessary to waste your time on developing exceptions for one brand of browsers or another brand of operating systems.

Imagine how a world with only open standards will look. You cannot imagine? Neither can I. But there are first steps visible everywhere.

• Extensions for OpenOffice.org and StarOffice exist for only a short time now. And already more than a hundred extensions were developed, almost all of them for free and fair use.

• The hybrid file format that is available within the Sun PDF Import extension is an example of an ingenious merger of an open standard and a publicly released de facto standard. The hybrid file format contains the same document in ODF and PDF together in one .pdf file. Users of OpenOffice.org can open this hybrid file and edit the contents like any other Writer, Calc, Draw, or Impress file, then export back to the hybrid format. Users of other PDF reader programs can open the same .pdf file and see the PDF, as they expect. (Requires at least OOo 3 Beta)
  

• Or have a look at this video by one of the StarOffice/OpenOffice.org developers which shows how to use the WebDAV support of OpenOffice.org to use Writer and Calc as editors for web sites. Perfect web sites, created and edited without the need to learn html.
  

By the way, googling for "the beauty of open standards", I found a nice blog about open standards by David A. Wheeler that is worth reading.

The intended use of PDF

You certainly know that OpenOffice.org can export your documents to Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). An introduction to this format can be found on the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format

This format was designed as an electronic equivalent of a page printed on paper. That is, it was not designed to be a format that can be edited.

Some users still want to edit a PDF file for some reasons. Workarounds were developed to enable editing of PDF files. For example, you can print the PDF document, then scan the printed page using an OCR program, edit the results, and generate a new PDF file from them. Currently, many OCR programs can open PDF files directly, thus saving the extra steps of using a printer and a scanner.

To export the current document as PDF

1. Choose File – Export as PDF.

2. In the PDF Options dialog box, select the PDF export options, then click Export.

   The application help explains the options that you can select on the five different tab pages. 

3. In the Export dialog box, select a path and type a name for the PDF file. Click Export.

If you later want to export as PDF again using the same PDF options, you can click the Export Directly As PDF icon on the Standard toolbar. This command does not display the PDF Options dialog box.

Editing PDF files

Starting with OpenOffice.org 3.0, a new extension can be used to import a PDF file for editing. This extension is still in its early stage of development, so do not expect a perfect roundtrip from PDF to ODF and back to PDF. However, the extension can be used for first tests right now.

Currently you need a recent developer version of OOo 3.0, which is available from http://download.openoffice.org/680/ or other web sites. Keep in mind that this is not a software to be used in productive environments, it is for experimental testing only.

Once you have installed the OOo 3.0 software, you can install the PDF Import extension. Download the extension from http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/pdfimport

To import a PDF file to OpenOffice.org 3

1. Choose File – Open.

2. Select the PDF file and click Open.

   You may set the file type to “PDF” to shorten the list of files, or enter *.pdf into the file name field to only select from files with that extension.

In the current state of development, the PDF file opens in OpenOffice.org Draw. Each page of the PDF file is shown on a page of the Draw document. You can double-click the text boxes and edit the text, or you can move the text boxes and the images, or use any of the Draw commands and icons.

To save a document as PDF file in OOo 3

When you are ready with editing the file, you can save the document.

A click on the Save icon will show the Save As dialog box, where you can enter a name for the new Draw document that you are currently editing. This creates an ODG file but not a new PDF file. You will get a PDF file by exporting as PDF, like before:

1. To create a new PDF file, choose File – Export As PDF.

2. In the PDF Options dialog box, you may want to enable the Create Hybrid File checkbox (see below).

3. Click Export.

4. You can enter a new name for the edited PDF document, or keep the old name to overwrite the previous document.

The ODF-PDF hybrid file 

Once you have installed the PDF Import extension for OOo 3, the PDF Options dialog shows a new checkbox on the General tab page: Create Hybrid File.

A hybrid file is a PDF file that contains the document in both formats, ODF and PDF. Most PDF viewer software will ignore the ODF bits and show the hybrid file as a normal PDF file. But in OOo 3, the hybrid file will open in the same module of OOo that created the hybrid file: Writer, Calc, Impress, or Draw. So the OOo 3 user can edit the original layout of the hybrid file, in the highest possible quality without any conversion losses, and then export as PDF again.

I bet that soon there will be many hybrid ODF-PDF files on the Web. These files enable users of OpenOffice.org 3 to edit the contents without problems. Of course you can choose to disable the Create Hybrid File checkbox, thus creating a normal PDF file without the additional ODF bits.

You can browse to the OOoNinja page for a nice report about this new feature:

http://www.oooninja.com/2008/06/pdf-import-hybrid-odf-pdfs-extension-30.html

A: Look here, darling, I've got something to tell you right now, and it is of highest priority.

B: You make me curious. Continue.

A: I've found some reasons to feel some affection towards you.

B: Can you be more precise in this statement, please?

A: I've found four reasons to feel an affection towards you increased up to 100 percent.

B: Go ahead ...

A: These are the reasons, in order from top to bottom:

1. You look so beautiful.
2. You give me reason to live.
3. I get excited when I think of you.
4. We can exchange more than words.

B: This is a numbered list, shouldn't it be a bullet list?

A: You're right as always, darling. I love the way you edit my words right out of my mouth.

B: Thank you for saying that. Al least you got the punctuation right. But you could have read the Sun Editorial Style Guide, Chapter 3, and follow that advice.

A: You're welcome, darling - better I wake up now.

This can happen to a tech writer when mixing up the following:

• reviewing a newly written Sun book all day long
• reading High Fidelity by Nick Hornby late at night
• trying to live a personal life, as much as possible, if possible at all