Open Office 1.1

Support

Inside the Application

Features:

Help in Menu Bar

• Contents – opens Help Application

• Help Agent – pops up “Light bulb Window” - links to info in the Help Application

• Tips – toggles on and off tool tips that name the menu items

• Extended tips – toggles on and off tool tips that explain the menu functions

• Support – opens Help Application with link to Online support

• About OO.org – links to Online Application

Help Application

• Drop Down menu switches between help for OO.org apps

• Table of Contents – navigation tree – easy to use

• Index – list all topics alphabetically with Search functions

• Find – quickly search through all documents

• Bookmarks – save specific help documents

• Right Click Navigation – navigate, bookmark, and print documents

Online Support

• “Under Construction” - this is a work in progress

• Prominent FAQ with General Topics

• Mailing lists for developers, issues, announcements, and users

• IRC chat open to the public

• Issuezilla used for bug tracking

• White Papers from Sun plus some guidelines and tutorials

Site mainly covers topics for fair use under OO.org license and information for developers. There is little about the OO.org applications themselves.

Conclusion

OpenOffice.org's website provides little help with the applications. Luckily, the help documentation available from the main menu is simple to navigate, easy to comprehend for general users, and provides detailed enough descriptions to serve as the main help system.

HTML Editor

Features:

Export Word Documents for the web – maintains tables, links, general formating (slips on some spacing issues). Generates the images embedded in the Word document separately for use on a website.

Easy to edit text, background color, and add images. Simple tables are easy to manage, can be used to display information quickly.

Can embed Flash swf files, mpeg file, quicktime, and generate formulas and charts.

Exports to PDF format.

Downsides:

Opening Word docs from within the HTML editor opens them in the Text Editor. You need to export them as HTML and then reopen the files in the HTML editor in order to make HTML changes.

Directly editing some specific HTML code in the “Source View” of the HTML editor does not persist when switched back to the Graphical Interface.

Exp: Body tag – cannot force marginwidth, marginheight, topmargin, leftmargin values

Hard to work with complex Tables – adding graphics have problems with scaling and can break the table. Not good for aiding graphical layout, which is what most HTML tables are used for.

Exp: I added a logo to a table and it was scaled down by half, and I couldn't get it back to the original proportions.

Cannot add a table within a table, only add columns and rows to a cell in order to create the illusion of “stacking” tables.

Uses inches as the default measurement for the HTML editor. Should be pixels.

Conclusion

The HTML Editor would be good for novice users looking to build basic websites without advanced formating like tables or DHTML. The program also makes quick work of transferring Word documents into HTML pages that won't break in the browser.

Potential Uses

• Quickly building websites with basic formating and low amount of graphics.

• Exporting Word documents to PDF and HTML for web, printing, and emailing.

• As a content manager – use Open Office to quickly edit HTML text documents that are included into web graphical templates Online through PHP or ASP.

• For teaching basic web design – application resembles familiar Word interface.