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Seven Cool Things You Can Do with OpenOffice.Org Even Microsoft Office can’t manage some of the tricks that OpenOffice.org—a free application suite, not just a Web site—has to offer. By Edward Mendelson OpenOffice.org 3.0 costs absolutely nothing, yet its features and functionality probably make it Microsoft Office’s biggest rival. Even though OpenOffice.org—which is, yes, an application suite, not just a Web site—can’t do everything Office can, it can do quite a bit, and it has some of its own tricks that even Office can’t manage. Here are a few of those tricks that may not be so obvious, as well as a few ways you can make OpenOffice.org less annoying upon install. 1. Edit two or more parts of a document at the same time. Microsoft Word has a nifty split-window feature that lets you divide the current window into two panes, so you can edit page 5 of your document in the top pane and page 505 in the bottom. To switch from one pane to the other, you don’t have to waste time scrolling back and forth—you
simply click in the other pane. OpenOffice.org doesn’t let you split a window into two panes, but it offers an even better feature. Click the Window menu, then New Window, to open a new window that displays the same document you’re working on. You can open as many windows as you want, each at a different place in your document; any change you make in one window is immediately reflected in all others. You can reduce screen clutter by turning off toolbars in one or more windows (use View | Toolbars). To tile or cascade the windows, right-click on the OpenOffice .org button on the Windows taskbar. 2. Turn off the blinking lightbulb. By default, a lightbulb icon appears in a tiny window whenever OpenOffice.org does anything that isn’t exactly what you typed—for example, when it replaces two
OnE bETTEr Than a SPlIT wIndOw PanE Use Window | New Window to open as many windows as you like on the same document. Note that you can display different toolbars, or no toolbars at all, in each window. 44 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
hyphens with a dash. It doesn’t exactly blink, but after the third or fourth time it opens, you may think of it as “that blinking lightbulb” (you might use a word other than “blinking”). To turn it off permanently, go to Tools | Options, and then, in the left-hand pane, expand the menu tree by clicking the plus sign next to OpenOffice.org. In the General dialog, remove the check mark next to Help Agent. 3. Use OpenOffice.org to open legacy documents. Years ago, older versions of Microsoft Office could open documents created by almost any of the myriad word processors and spreadsheet programs that were widely used before Microsoft monopolized the market. Recent versions of Office can’t open many of those older formats—including files in old Microsoft Word versions, such as Word 6.0. By contrast, OpenOffice.org continues to open Word documents dating back to Version 6.0. OpenOffice.org also opens WordPerfect documents, including files created in WordPerfect for the Macintosh 3.5 Enhanced, which not even WordPerfect for Windows tries to open. By the way, there’s something confusing about OpenOffice.org’s claims. The product purports to support at least one format that never existed: The list of supported file types in its File | Open dialog includes “Microsoft WinWord 5.0,” even though there never was such a version. Word for Windows skipped from 2.0 to 6.0 in its version numbers. 4. Play a vintage Space Invaders game. Remember the days of software “Easter Eggs”? These were not-very-secret keystrokes or mouse clicks that brought up silly graphics in some programs and games in others. Even Microsoft Excel
