1. List of office suites
2. OOo documentation
3. Other OOo links

OOo links

Short list of office suites

Wikipedia:
Office suite
(including list
of suites)

OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org/ Wikipedia

Home suite home. Free, cross-platform on Windows, Linux, Mac, and localized for dozens of languages.

Microsoft Office http://office.microsoft.com/ Wikipedia

The other white meat. The ubiquitou$ $oftware $uite corporate people swear by, or at. Most definitely not available for Linux.

Corel WordPerfect Office http://www.corel.com/ Wikipedia

Not dead yet. Includes the elder statesman WordPerfect word processor, the Quattro Pro spreadsheet, and the admirable Paradox database manager, all of which I used lots in the early Nineties.

StarOffice http://www.sun.com/software/staroffice/ Wikipedia

Sun Microsystems' (and now Oracle's) $70 shrinkwrap commercial office suite, from the OOo code base, with some extras and gingerbread.

IBM Lotus Symphony http://www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony Wikipedia

Freeware cross-platform office suite developed by IBM China in Beijing; first beta 2007, 1.0 release 2008. No relation to 1980's DOS suite Lotus Symphony, other than the similar name.

Google Docs http://docs.google.com/ Wikipedia

Google's online office suite provides for online storage and Web-based editing of word processing documents, spreadsheets, and since September 2007, presentations, including support for Microsoft and OpenDocument formats.

Zoho Office Suite http://www.zoho.com/ Wikipedia

Web-based online office suite, including support for word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and presentations, in Microsoft and OpenDocument formats.

ThinkFree Office Online http://www.thinkfree.com/ Wikipedia

Free Java-based online office suite supports the file formats and many of the features of Microsoft Office. The service allows you to store up to 30MB of documents on their server at no charge, which you can log into, access, and edit from any Java-enabled browser anywhere. They also offer $50 ThinkFree Office, also Java-based, which you can download, install, and register.

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OOo documentation

OpenOffice.org Documentation Project http://documentation.openoffice.org/

PDF guides, FAQs, how-tos, samples, templates, links.

User Guide for OpenOffice.org 2.x http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/
OOoAuthors User Guides for 2.x http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/oooauthors2/

These are two independent sets of PDF guides for OOo. The single-file "User Guide" (the first link) is by the OOo developers, I think. The multiple "OOoAuthors User Guides" files are by other contributors, and have a lot more material. I'd suggest you try to keep on hand the latest version of the developers' guide, plus whatever chapters/books of the OOoAuthors guides are relevant to your current projects.*

OOoAuthors.org (English) http://www.oooauthors.org/english

Development site for volunteer OOo documentation, including volunteer reviewing, writing, editing, proofreading, and indexing.

OOoForum http://www.oooforum.org/
OOoForum links page http://www.oooforum.org/links.phtml

Discussion and community support.

OOExtras home page http://www.smalldataproblem.org/ooextras/
OOExtras project page http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooextras

Contributed templates, macros, documents, and a clip art image library.

There are some OpenOffice.org books available, but be careful. Some of them were written for OOo 1.x or 2.x. It's common for publishers of software books about 1.x version series not to specify version number information in their book titles at all, for unscrupulous marketing reasons. You may also have to special-order OOo books, as opposed to finding them sitting on the shelf at the bookstore.

* Because of frequent updates to the PDF user guides and ongoing development of OOo features, you may or may not want to attempt to print out the PDF guides. You may need to just get as comfortable as you can with reading them on your monitor in Adobe Reader, formerly known as Acrobat Reader. Fortunately the OOo guides all seem to have good PDF bookmarks you can use to jump to their section headings, which helps lots.

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Other OOo links

OpenOffice.org Extensions Repository http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/

With Highest Rated and Most Popular links.

OpenOffice.org Template Repository http://templates.services.openoffice.org/

Browse and download templates, or submit ones you create.

Sun OOo Template Pack (English) http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/SunTemplatepack_1
Sun OOo Template Pack II (English) http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/TemplatePack_II

With links to versions for some other languages.

Wikipedia: OpenOffice.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org

History of OOo, issues, references, Easter eggs.

Wikipedia: OpenDocument http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

Extensive article on the OASIS OpenDocument ISO 26300 standard and attendant controversy.

OpenDocument Fellowship http://opendocumentfellowship.org/

Another excellent resource. (No, it's not two men, four hobbits, a dwarf, an elf, and a wizard.)

OpenDocument Format Alliance http://www.odfalliance.org/

Impressive global list of organizations supporting OpenDocument.

Open Source for America http://www.odfalliance.org/

Coalition of 50 companies and educational institutions, including Red Hat, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, to promote use of open source software by the US federal government.

opendocument.xml.org http://opendocument.xml.org/

Online community for OpenDocument.

Adobe Reader http://www.adobe.com/products/reader/
Adobe Reader http://www.oldversion.com/Acrobat-Reader.html

You probably already have Adobe Reader installed; if not, you're going to need it for the PDF-format OOo user guides and howto guides. As of Reader 7 Adobe's own Reader downloads were online installers as with IE, which ignore user-selected download managers. OldVersion.com has full offline install packages. Formerly known as Acrobat Reader.

OOo Ninja http://www.oooninja.com/

OOo blog, news and tips, usually including new features of upcoming releases.

OOoWikipedia plugin http://oooconv.free.fr/wikipedia/wikipedia_en.html

Lets you highlight a word or phrase in an OOo document and quickly open the relevant Wikipedia entry in your Web browser. Not so great for dialup, obviously.

Java Runtime Environment (JRE) free download http://java.sun.com/

As of third quarter 2007 the current JRE comes bundled with the OpenOffice.org download. If you ever need to, you can get it here direct from Sun. See my Getting OOo page, install/configure section, for why you'll want a Java Runtime along with OOo, if you don't already have one. On the Sun download pages, make sure you select the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) and not the JDK (Java Development Kit).

GNOME/OpenOffice.org http://projects.gnome.org/ooo/
KDE Integration Project http://kde.openoffice.org/

OOo on the two main Linux environments.

OpenOffice.org for Developers http://development.openoffice.org/

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OpenOffice.org ODF Toolkit http://odftoolkit.openoffice.org/

Supporting development of other tools for working with OpenDocument files.