OpenOffice.org contains a number of productivity applications for use in creating text documents, preparing spreadsheets, organizing presentations, managing projects, and more. The following components of the OpenOffice.org package are included with Fedora:

Fedora provides an RPM package for OpenOffice.org. If you do not install the RPM package during your initial Fedora installation, you can install it later, using the Add/remove Applications tool or by using yum install openoffice.org from the command line.

The installation of OpenOffice.org is done on a systemwide basis, meaning that all users have access to it. However, each user has to go into OpenOffice.org to configure it for their individual needs. This initial configuration happens transparently the first time you load any of the OpenOffice.org components, and might mean the application takes a little longer to load as a result. Be patient, and your desired application will appear.

Shown in Figure 9.1 are icons on the left of the top desktop panel that represent the different components of OpenOffice.org as well as other applications. From left to right, beginning with the Applications and Actions menus, the icons represent the Firefox web browser, Evolution email, OpenOffice.org Writer, OpenOffice.org Impress, and OpenOffice.org Calc. The icons displayed on your desktop might vary from those shown here. If you click the Applications icon, the main menu opens, and all the OpenOffice.org applications can be accessed from the Office menu.

Figure 9.1. The OpenOffice.org suite provided by Fedora is simple to configure and use.

As is the case with many Linux applications, you may be somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer number of configuration options available to you in OpenOffice.org. Thankfully a lot of thought has gone into organizing these options, which are available by clicking the Tools menu and selection Options. It does not matter which program you use to get to this dialog box, it appears the same if summoned from Writer, Impress, or Calc. It acts as a central configuration management tool for all OpenOffice.org applications. You can use it to set global options for all OpenOffice.org applications, or specific options for each individual component. For instance, in Figure 9.2, you can change the user details and information, and this is reflected across all OpenOffice.org applications.

Figure 9.2. You can set user details for all OpenOffice.org applications from this dialog.

OpenOffice.org is a constant work in progress, but the current release is on par with the Sun version of StarOffice 8.0. You can browse to the OpenOffice.org website to get documentation and answers to frequently asked questions and to offer feedback.

You can access Writer either through its shortcut on the panel or by going to the Applications, Office menu and selecting Word Processor. After a few seconds Writer opens up with a blank document and a blinking cursor awaiting your command. It can be tempting to just dive in and start typing your document, but it can be worthwhile to do some initial configuration before you get stuck in.

First of all, make sure that the options are set to your requirements. Click the Tools menu and select Options to bring up the Options dialog box as seen in Figure 9.2. The initial screen allows you to personalize OpenOffice.org with your name, address, and contact details, but there are options to configure features that you might also want to alter. First of all, check that your default paths are correct by clicking the Paths option. You might want to alter the My Documents path, as shown in Figure 9.3, to something a little more specific than just your home directory.

Figure 9.3. Click the Edit button to choose your default documents directory.

You might also want to change OpenOffice.org so that it saves in Microsoft Word format by default, should you so require. This can be done under the Load/Save General options shown in Figure 9.4, and it is a good idea if you value your work to change the Autorecovery settings so that it saves every couple of minutes.

Figure 9.4. Make sure that you are working with most appropriate file formats for you.

Also shown in Figure 9.4 are a set of options that are specific to Writer. From top to bottom, they are

A little bit of time working through these options can give you a highly personalized and extremely productive environment.

One of the significant benefits of using Writer is the ability to easily apply formatting and styles to extremely complex documents. Depending on the type of documents you work with, you might want to consider creating your own styles beyond the 20 included by default. Styles can be accessed either by the Style drop down box in the toolbar, or by the Styles and Formatting window shown in Figure 9.5. If you cannot see the window, press the F11 key to display it.

Figure 9.5. Writer’s quick and easy-to-use Styles and Formatting tool.

The easiest way to work with the Styles and Formatting tool is to highlight the text you want to style up and double-click the required style in the window. There are quite a few to choose from, but you might find them restrictive if you have more specialized needs. To start defining your own styles, press Ctrl+F11 to bring up the Style Catalog, shown in Figure 9.6, where you add, modify and delete styles for pages, paragraphs, lists, characters and frames.

Figure 9.6. Writer’s powerful Style Catalog gives you control over every aspect of styling.

You can either click the shortcut icon that is located on the top GNOME panel, or select Spreadsheet from the Office menu under the Applications main menu. Whichever route you take, the result is the same and Calc starts to load.

By default, Calc loads with a blank spreadsheet just waiting for you to enter information into it. In Figure 9.7, you can see that we have already started to enter some basic information into Calc.

Figure 9.7. Use Calc to store numerical and statistical information.

Calc’s layout makes it easy to organize information into rows and columns. As you can see in the example, we have sales people listed alongside the left hand column, customers in the second column, Invoice Date in the third column, and finally Revenue in the fourth column. At the moment, there are no formulas entered to help you interpret the data. Clicking the E43 cell selects it and allows us to enter in a formula in the top formula bar. If we enter in the equal sign, Calc knows that what we are entering is a formula and works accordingly.

In our example, we want to know the total revenue brought in up to now, so we need to enter in the formula =sum(E3:E42) and press return. Calc automatically enters the result into cell E43 for you to see. Now we want to see what the average order value was. To do this, we have to obtain how many orders there were. For this we can use the counta function to count the number of entries in a given list. This is usually used when you need to find out how many entries there are in a text list. So, in cell B43, enter =counta(B3:B42) and press Enter. Calc now counts the number of entries in the range and returns the total in B43. All that remains for us to do is divide the total revenue by the number of orders to find the average order value. So, in cell E44, enter the formula =E43/B43 to get the average order value.

Getting back to our example, it looks a little basic at the moment as there is no formatting involved. For instance, which currency are we billing in? You can also see that some of the cells have text that does not fit, which is highlighted by a small right arrow in the cell. We should also add some labels and titles to our spreadsheet to make it a bit more visually appealing.

To start off, let’s make all the revenue figures into currency figures. To do this, select all the cells containing revenue information and click on the small icon shown in Figure 9.8. This immediately formats the cells so that they display the dollar sign and also puts in a thousands separator to make the numbers easier to read.

Figure 9.8. Make numbers more meaningful with the currency and percentage icons.

Now we need to space all the cells so that we can read all the information! A quick and easy way to do this is to click the area immediately to the left of column A and immediately above row 1 to select the entire spreadsheet. Now all you have to do is double-click the dividing lines and each column resizes according to its longest entry.

Next let’s add a little color to our worksheet by using the paint can icon in the toolbar. Select the range B2 to E2 with the mouse cursor and click the paint can icon to bring up the color window as shown in Figure 9.9. Now select the color you want to use and Calc fills the cells with that color. You can also change the font color by using the icon immediately to the right in the same way.

Figure 9.9. Add a touch of color to an otherwise dull spreadsheet with the fill background icon.

Finally we need to add a couple more finishing touches. The first one is to enlarge the font for the column headers. Select the range B2 to E2 again and click the font size in the toolbar to change it to something a little larger. You might also want to use the bold and italic options to emphasize the headers and also the totals some more.

If you have followed the steps as described, you should end up with a spreadsheet similar to the one in Figure 9.10.

Figure 9.10. The finished article, looking a lot better than before!

Calc includes a powerful tool that lets you summarize large groups of data to help you when you need to carry out any analysis. This tool is called a data pilot, and you can use it to quickly summarize data that might normally take a long time if you did the calculations manually. Using the sample spreadsheet from earlier, we will take you through how to build a simple data pilot, showing you how to analyze and manipulate long lists of data.

In the previous section we worked with a spreadsheet that showed sales people, customers, date of invoice, and revenue. At the foot of the spreadsheet there were a couple of formulas that allowed us to quickly see the total revenue earned and the average order value.

Now we want to find out how our sales people have earned individually. Of course you could add this up manually using a calculator, but that would defeat the point of using Calc. So, we need to create a data pilot to help us summarize the information.

First, we need to select all the cells from B2 to E42 as this is the data that we want to analyze. After these are selected, click on the Data menu and select Data Pilot, Start to open up the Data Pilot Wizard. The first screen is shown in Figure 9.11 and is defaulted to current selection. Make sure that you choose this one to use the data in the selected range and click OK to continue.

Figure 9.11. Use either the current selection or an external data source to provide the data pilot with information.

The next screen allows you to lay out your data pilot as you want it. In this example we want to have Sales Person in the left hand column marked Row Fields, so click and drag the Sales Person option from the list on the right and drop it onto the Row Fields area. We also want to see the revenue broken down by Month, so drag the Invoice Date box to the Column Field area. Finally drag Customers to the Page Field area (so you can filter by Customer) and drag the Revenue option to the Data Field area. You should end up with something like Figure 9.12 and you are almost ready to display your data pilot.

Figure 9.12. Lay your data pilot out as you want it.

The final piece in the puzzle is to tell Calc where you want it to place the finished data pilot. To do this, click the More button to drop down some extra options and select the box Send Results To to choose a new sheet. When you click OK now, Calc builds the data pilot and displays it on a new sheet in your workbook. The new data pilot can be seen in Figure 9.13.

Figure 9.13. Summarize large volumes of numerical data with ease using Calc’s Data Pilot function.