StarOffice 5.2 Companion
Authors: Floyd Jones, Solveig Haugland
Venue:  (2000)

From the Book:StarOffice - 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 onWindows, 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!