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The name of the organisation that maintains the codebase for the identically named OfficeSuite.

OpenOffice.org is Free and CrossPlatform, running on many Unix variants (including Linux, of course) MicrosoftWindows, and MacOSX.

Some features:

  • It is pretty good at importing MicrosoftWord documents (other than VisualBasic macros).
  • Version 1.1 and later can export to PDF natively, so you can type up documents and then make nice PDF files with TrueType fonts in it. (The PDF page lists some good reasons why emailing PDF files around is better than emailing word-processor files around).
  • The Debian package of version 1.1 uses native GTK2 widgets, so it fits nicely into a GNOME desktop. (There is a subproject of openoffice to use native widgets on all platforms - see http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/. GTK and Win32 are already supported but it is not yet in the main CVS branch. Good on Debian for including it already!)
  • Redhat, Novell and Debian are all using the same CVS server on gnome.org which includes these additions.
  • Open file format - it uses XML so you will never be in the situation where you have old documents but can't extract any information out of it. In version 2.0 it changed to another format called OpenDocument which is also XML based but is designed to be used by multiple applications.
  • Version 1.1 is much improved over version 1.0, especially in terms of start-up time.

OpenOffice.org is included on TheOpenCD, which is an easy way for windows users to try this great OpenSource software without having to commit to a large change.


Installing and Setting up NewZealand English Dictionary

(This proceedure isn't necessary with OOo version 2 and later, as the NZ dictionaries are included. Check at menu > Tools > Options > Language Settings > Languages and look in the pull down menu for Default languages for documents. If English (New Zealand) has a little abc next to it, the NZ dictionary is installed already.) By default, OpenOffice includes support for English (US), and unfortunately none of the add-on language installers supports English (New Zealand). So, here is one way to manually get support for it. The following instructions will change the configuration globally, and may require administrator privileges.

1. OpenOffice uses "myspell" dictionaries. Download the dictionary .zip file for en_NZ from their ftp site. (This is based on the en_GB (Great Britain) dictionary but updated with NZ placenames, etc). It is about 220kB in size.

2. Unzip this .zip file into an appropriate directory. On a Debian Unstable machine, OpenOffice looks for dictionaries in /usr/lib/openoffice/share/dict/ooo, but that is a symlink to /usr/share/myspell/dicts.

cd /usr/lib/openoffice/share/dict/ooo && unzip /path/to/en_NZ.zip

This should give you files named "en_NZ.aff" and "en_NZ.dic". On windows, it will be whereever you installed it to, most likely something like C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org1.1.2\share\dict\ooo.

3. In the dictionaries directory above, edit the file "dictionary.lst" and add a line that says

DICT en NZ en_NZ

Now, the next time you start OpenOffice, you should be able to set the language to English (New Zealand) and see a little dictionary icon next to it. If you are using the OpenOffice quick start or something that keeps it in memory, you will need to completely close down OpenOffice first.

4. To get the thesaurus and hyphenation working as well, you can use the files provided by other variants of English. Eg if you have support for en_US thesaurus (install the "openoffice.org-thesaurus-en-us" package in Debian, or download it) and the en_GB hyphenation support ("openoffice.org-hyphenation-en-gb" in Debian, or download it)

then you can add
THES en NZ th_en_US HYPH en NZ hyph_en_GB

to the "dictionary.lst" file as above.

Alternately, for OpenOffice.org >= 1.1.1, go to "File -> Wizards -> Install new dictionary" to use the OOoDic Autopilot. Click on "English", press the "Start DicOOo" button, and use the dialog to download any needed dictionaries, hyphenations, or thesauri. Note that you don't need root privileges (useful if you are the only OpenOffice user on your machine) or to mess with symlinks or dictionary.lst. The default behavior is to install in the current user's .openoffice/1.1.1/user/wordbook or .openoffice.org2/user/wordbook (depending on OpenOffice version) directory. ** This doesn't seem to work for the openoffice in Ubuntu 5.10 - the 'install new dictionary' menu item does nothing? -- JohnMcPherson

More verbose instructions for manually installing dictionaries under linux are available here.

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