StarOffice 5.2 Companion - Softcover

Jones, Floyd; Haugland, Solveig

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0130307033 ISBN 13: 9780130307033

Publisher: Prentice Hall Ptr, 2000

Synopsis

Introduces the free integrated software package's newest features, including Microsoft Office compatibility, and cross-platform potential, while covering installation, configuration, and component applications.

About this title

About the Author

FLOYD JONES has eight years of extensive experience creating print and online documentation for a wide range of software products, ranging from accounting to golf course management. He currently writes Java training courses for Sun Microsystems.

SOLVEIG HAUGLAND has ten years of experience as a technical writer, specializing in documentation for system administration and programming languages. She currently writes Java training courses for Sun Microsystems.

From the Back Cover

The practical, user-friendly, insider's guide to mastering StarOffice!

• The step-by-step, task-based productivity guide to StarOffice
• For Windows, Linux, and Solaris platforms
• Covers Writer, Calc, Impress, Web, Draw, Image, Schedule, Mail, Address Book, Base, and more

Imagine: an office productivity suite that's powerful, easy to use, thoroughly integrated—and free! For millions of Linux, Solaris, and Windows users, this is no fantasy. It's a reality, with StarOffice. Now, there's a comprehensive, task-based guide to making the most of StarOffice 5.2—direct from Sun Microsystems, developer of StarOffice!

StarOffice 5.2 Companion also incorporates solutions to questions from hundreds of new StarOffice users, making this the most practical, task-oriented book around. This book delivers clear, step-by-step coverage of every key StarOffice component—focusing on the features, techniques, and tips that help you do what you need to do to get your job done.

You'll find comprehensive coverage of all of the following and more:

• Conversion to and from Microsoft file formats—on individual files, entire folders, and scores of other file formats
• StarOffice Writer: editing, formatting, collaboration, long documents, mail merge, and printing
• StarOffice Calc: data entry, formatting, calculations, functions, and data analysis tools
• StarOffice Impress: creating, organizing, designing, and delivering presentations
• StarOffice Draw and Image: lines, objects, colors, text, vector drawings, and raster graphics in popular formats like JPG and GIF
• StarOffice Web: browsing the Internet, creating HTML documents, hyperlinks, converting other StarOffice formats to HTML, WebCast presentations, FTP, and animated text and graphics
• StarOffice Schedule: event and task management, views and filters, notifications, workgroup scheduling, and PalmPilot synchronization
• StarOffice Mail and Address Book: email, newsgroups, and contacts management
• Installation and printer setup information: Getting StarOffice up and running quickly on your home computer, and detailed instructions for implementing an enterprise-wide networked solution
• Customizing the StarOffice integrated environment to make using StarOffice simple and productive

StarOffice Companion also contains detailed coverage of StarOffice 5.2's Web browsing and database features—even an introduction to StarOffice Basic, StarOffice's powerful macro automation language.

Want to get productive with StarOffice? Here's the practical, direct, expert guide you've been searching for: StarOffice 5.2 Companion.

From the Inside Flap

PrefaceStarOffice - Overturning Universal Truths

It used to be that the saying, "You get what you pay for," ranked up there with such indisputable truths as, "What goes up must come down," "Water is wet," and "I had to restart Windows today."

In giving away StarOffice, a powerful, full-featured suite of office software applications, Sun Microsystems has made the saying, "you get what you pay for," not only disputable, but just plain false. StarOffice's applications for working with documents, spreadsheets, slide presentations, Web sites, graphics, and databases, and for managing schedules, appointments, and email, make StarOffice a legitimate replacement for any office product on the market.

StarOffice is free. It provides a user-friendly, flexible, and completely integrated work environment. It provides a comprehensive set of tools that let you, for example, create a Web site start-to-finish (along with graphics, animations, and image maps) and upload the files to a Web server. It supports an obscene number of file formats. It needs less storage space than Microsoft Office.

What goes up must come down. Water is wet. StarOffice is free.

(And yes, I really did have to restart Windows today.)Microsoft Office Compatibility

StarOffice is particularly strong in its ability to open Microsoft Office file formats and save the documents back as Microsoft Office files. It even boasts an AutoPilot that automatically converts entire directories of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents and their templates to StarOffice formats, from which you can save back to the original Microsoft formats.What It Runs On

StarOffice runs on Windows, Linux, and Solaris. Even though MacOS isn't currently supported, you can set StarOffice to display dialog boxes that look exactly like Macintosh dialog boxes.About this Book

This is a book that lets you find what you need quickly and get it done. This isn't a book for "dummies," with epic-length procedures for cutting and pasting. On the other hand, we don't include extensive details on technical concepts like ODBC and LDAP.

We wrote the book that we would want: all the important stuff, but nothing too basic or technically impractical for the intermediate user (and with a little humor along the way). We also talked to hundreds of new StarOffice users, so we were able to document what people really need to do using StarOffice to do it.

We made certain assumptions before starting this book. We assume that you are familiar and comfortable with the operating system you're using, and that you have previously used products like StarOffice, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, or presentation tool.Reading Is Fundamental

If you're like most intermediate users, you already know enough to be dangerous, which means you'll probably just dive in and try to do things in StarOffice without any help. Sometimes that strategy works, other times it doesn't. If it doesn't, read the relevant sections in this book. We also indexed the living daylights out of this book, so use the Index, too, particularly a little entry we like to call "troubleshooting."What Now?

Download and install StarOffice 5.2 if you haven't already. See Chapter 1, Installation, on page 3 for more information.

Go through Chapter 3, Taming the StarOffice Environment, on page 91. It gives you an overview of the StarOffice work environment and shows you lots of useful things that will help you no matter which StarOffice applications you're using.

Use the tutorials. We've included something for those of you who like to plunge in quickly and get your hands dirty without reading all the procedures ahead of time. At the beginning of most major parts of the book, there's a section called Quick Start that contains a Guided Tour. The guided tour leads you through specific steps that will help you get to know a lot of the features for each product, including features you probably won't come across while just exploring, as well as few of the product's "gotchas" that we want you to know ahead of time.

Don't panic!

Edition details

• Publisher: Prentice Hall Ptr
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0130307033
• ISBN 13: 9780130307033
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1121