Recent News.

Due to insomnia and a teething one-year-old, I have been missing a little bit of sleep. Well, luckily, I finally found a little bit of it! Yay!

Back to regular blogging. This week brought our awards banquet, which was quite nice. It did, however, remind me of a gripe I had years ago about OpenOffice.org. You will remember that I love oo.o. It's a great program, and I highly recommend it to anyone who needs a Office Productivity Suite.

On to my complaint. OpenOffice has a .PDF exportation feature, which is really nice! Nice, that is, as long as you are printing something completely text-based. It does horribly with graphics. OpenOffice Draw allows you to make some stunning publications, but it can be difficult to get those publications to print professionally because print shops don't like to support OO.o. Now, I'm only speaking of the print shops here in Rural No-Where, your shop might gladly support OpenOffice.

If you are interested in printing a lot of documents with these great tools, ask your shop if they support the Open Office Suite. If they tell you that they do not, talk to a manager and let him or her know that they can easily support it by downloading it from Sun! Make sure you mention that it's (I believe) the fasted growing office productivity suite! (Ok, so there is not much competition for growth!)

Upcoming blogs include my efforts to turn my linux box into a multimedia productivity station by installing a dynebolic partition (not any time soon, probably). You will also get to read about regular expressions as I write some lessons regarding this powerful tool.

If you're anxious for more Jelkimantis stuff, head on over to www.jelkimantis.com, or follow me on twitter!

OpenOffice.org 3

The OpenOffice.org project recently (in October of 2009), released their 3.0 edition. I usually wait a little while before I install new software, just to give them a bit to work out any bugs. Rarely do I say, "wow" when I install new software, but... wow.

They increased the modularity of the program. For you who are not familiar with the "linux philosophy," they like to keep things simple. One program for one tool, or in the instance of oo.o, one interface for one task. Here the oo.o team added a bunch of great things. There is a new interface just for math. You can make up those great (and complex) equations that I've never understood. You can also add in some great extensions that increase the power of OpenOffice.org beyond the coolness that it already is.

I've not yet fiddled with the oo.o printer manager, but it seems to just be a printer interface for the local CUPS server. Not sure why it's there, but ok, whatever.

Well, the moral of the story is this. If you need a word processing tool, and you're just not feeling the love with the MS 2007 "ribbon" interface, OpenOffice.org is a great GNU alternative. At least, I think that the program is GNU, it might be a different license, but it's still open source and being built by a community of users.