Office, Free?

Some of you may have decided to download NeoOffice for all of your Documentation, Presentation, and Spreadsheet needs (because it's free). Now what? John Carter shares some details here.

"Would you like to get to know this application a little better? What better way than with a tutorial that guides you through several practice items for each type of document? You can get this tutorial online as an eBook in PDF format here.

"That site contains links to several documents in the section labelled 'Download Documentation.' The one I recommend is OpenOffice.org 3x Conceptual Guides to get a thorough treatment of all aspects of NeoOffice. Please download any and all documents that pique your interest. And don't forget to grab the OpenOffice Lesson Files (a zip file that you have to unzip) that go with the OpenOffice.org 3x Conceptual Guides. Download all these files to the same folder in your hard drive where you can easily access them.

"Even though these documents are written for OpenOffice, they will work for NeoOffice. The differences will be slight, if any, and the compatibility is 100%.

"There are significant advantages to using NeoOffice over OpenOffice, mainly speed and in additional features added specifically for the Mac.

"The NeoOffice documentation shows how to create a PDF file using 'File->Export as PDF...', but sometimes that method doesn't result in a 100% accurate rendition of the file. The method I prefer to create a PDF file is to use File->Print, then select 'Save as PDF...' from the PDF button in the first print window:

"This gives you a 100% compatible output with the way it looks on the screen."
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