Staroffice 6.0 Office Suite Companion

by Solveig Haugland and Floyd Jones

BASIC APPROACH PLEASE PROVIDE COURSE INFORMATION This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0130384739
• ISBN13: 9780130384737
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
• Length: 1031 Pages
• Weight: 3.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 7.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Buy it even if you already know StarOffice

It covers the QuirksThis book doesn't just tell you how StarOffice is supposed to work, it also tells you about some of its quirks and peculiarities. The book doesn't assume everyone uses Windows and includes information on the Unix/Linux versions. It gives pointers to other resources, such as websites with templates and macro programming information. Book StructureThe Getting Started section covers the "why" of StarOffice and the "how" of Setup. The "why" includes "Ten reasons to Use StarOffice". This includes "Bill Gates has enough money, Do you?" and "It has the best drawing program you've never used". Of course the authors are slightly biased but the list contains more fact than propaganda. The Getting Started section also covers differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org, comparisons with earlier versions and a summary of features. It then moves on to the more gritty details of installation, configuration and trouble shooting.Not just for beginnersMy main exposure to StarOffice was with the incredibly powerful Word Processing feature (Writer) I have written a 280 page book about Java Programming and have found that module to be excellent. Despite having considerable experience with it, even a brief reading of the Writer section gave me some ideas about my further use. Notably I am going to remember to use captions for figures and tables in documents in future, so I can automatically generate lists of them for the table of contents. It is interesting to note that the authors describe the Master Document Feature in Writer as being a lot closer to FrameMaker than to Word. If you don't know about it, FrameMaker is a tool used for creating industrial strength documents such as technical manuals and full sized books. The book covers the dull but very important details of areas such as page numbering and chapter settings. This was something that frustrated me when I was learning StarOffice 5.2 and I wanted to ensure that the pages in each chapter had the chapter name at the top. I had to blunder my way about experimenting and fiddling with this, and the vagaries of the Master Document system. My life would have been much easier if I had been able to use a book like this at the time.In addition to the document management features the book covers the more "Page Layout" style features of StarOffice such as the ability to manage columns and to place vertical text running up the page. These are features I was not even aware existed in StarOffice before I read this book.It's big and its packed with information The StarOffice companion has over 1030 pages, but it is really bigger than it sounds because it is very dense. Although it has many screen shots, plenty of use is made of text based instructions. Instead of repeating instructions, the text will often point you to the page where a concept was first explained. This does break up the flow of instructions but it also means that the book contains more information than if they had repeated the

Best StarOffice book

I've looked at all the StarOffice books out now and this is the one I like the best. This one seems better researched in terms of what people need to do, and isn't simply a cataloging of the features in the software and how to choose File > Print. <p>A few of the things I like the best are the tutorials at the beginning of every section, the well documented screen shots and illustrations, addressing common things that are hard to figure out like bringing a text file into a spreadsheet and printing the spreadsheet correctly, and the excellent index.

Great. A "must have" for StarOffice

Great book, clearly written (and light hearted which seems sadly rare in technical books) and perhaps most valuable of all, _great_index_. You have a problem, you look in the index, you find the section you need, and then you find a clear, concise, to the point description of how to do what you need.StarOffice (version 6.0) is a great product (I'm using it on Windows, but I understand it runs on Linux and Solaris too). It's massively better value for money than anything micky$loth ever produced (it would be better value even at two or three times the price) but it's user interface is somewhat unfamiliar (well, duh, it's not micky$loth, so of course it's unfamiliar) and a little help learning your way around is worth it's weight in gold. Fortunately this multi-pound gem doesn't cost that much :)Get StarOffice, get this book, get on with your life, and find something more interesting to spend those license fees on than giving them to someone so rich he doesn't need it anyway ;>

I'm getting this for all my employees

We just switched to StarOffice at work, with a few rogue openoffice.org copies floating around, and, OK, it was a bit bumpy in the first few months. Some of the vocal people went over my head to the VP and said they needed their Word and Excel back. However, she said we weren't allowed to give up on it without actually making sure that we couldn't do it, so of course it was my job to go down to the bookstore and sit there til I found out how to do everything. There was a huge list of stuff we hadn't figured out: do mail merges, print correctly in Calc, print multiple slides per page, import text files into Calc, do animated slides, do numbered headings and cross references in documents and a bunch of other things the techwriters were fussing about, and I forget what else but at least a dozen other things that no one could figure out. I started with some 5.2 books but then found this 6.0 StarOffice Companion and I found EVERYTHING in this book. EVERYTHING. You can use this at home and make yourself happier, but that's just you. Think about the big picture. If you use StarOffice in a business setting, and your salary actually depends on how the business does, and you go down the hall hearing people cursing at their computers, you will really understand how many thousands or millions of dollars it can cost to have your employees struggling with their software. So I'm paying the measly cost of the book for each of my 34 employees, and I'll get the cost back in about 14 minutes for each of them, because they'll actually be able to work well in StarOffice and they won't be going over my head to the VP.If you're using StarOffice commercially, you MUST get this book. While it's fun to be snooty and talk about how you're Alternative and Open Source and all that stuff, it's really all about whether you can get work done and make money.

This is great!

I got this a couple weeks ago and the only thing I'm annoyed about is that I didn't have it sooner. It's what I needed for the last three months while I was figuring things out the hard way. Finally got headers and footers working and page numbering, once I read the book.Get it, use it. Life will be easier.