Last night I was at a Colorado Translators Association event at which the presenter (the ever-popular editing consultant Alice Levine), mentioned an online tutorial for the Track Changes feature in Microsoft Word. This made me realize that there must be similar websites for OpenOffice.org. Here are a few that I’ve found:
A really comprehensive resource for OpenOffice.org users is Get OpenOffice.org, which offers all kinds of training materials, transition advice, tips on running OO.o on Vista, etc. Solveig Haugland, the founder of Get OpenOffice.org is also the author of the OpenOffice.org 2 Guidebook, so this website rates high on the reliability index! She also has a blog about OO.o, at OpenOffice.blogs.com.
Learn OpenOffice.org offers a variety of free online tutorials that focus on how to solve a particular problem using OO.o. Their tutorials look really helpful and you can choose between text-only or Flash mode (thank you!). The only drawback is that there are tutorials for Impress (OO.o’s presentation program) and Calc (spreadsheet), but not for Writer, which is the application that most translators are likely to use.
The official OO.o website has a tutorials page, with lessons written by various contributors. The topics are a bit random since they’re contributed by volunteers and most of the tutorials require you to download a file, but these are definitely work a look.
A very helpful site is VnTutor, which has a lengthy list of tutorials for Writer, Base, Impress and Calc and allows you to view them right on the site. The tutorials also have lots of pictures to make their points clearer.
Although it’s not specifically a tutorial, my pick for online OO.o information would be Solveig Haugland’s blog, and you can use the Categories menu on the right to find the topic you’re interested in.
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