Recently, I’ve been in contact with an Ohio school district through an educational technology mailing list. The district has migrated to NeoOffice on all its computers (Macs, of course), but did not implement training or documentation for the new users. Thus, they have had some frustrations with the migration.

I sent the following in an email to give them the resources they need to get comfortable with their new software, and I’m posting it here in case it is useful for others in a similar situation:

I’m happy to help you find the NeoOffice (and related OpenOffice) online communities. Without participating in these, or without any training to accompany the switch, I can see why you and your colleagues would be frustrated! I hope I can help you all cross over the transition period to smooth sailing beyond.

For manuals, I suggest Solveig Haugland’s and the OOoAuthors Project’s manuals.

Solveig’s blog offers useful tips every day: http://www.openoffice.blogs.com/
Her book is called “OpenOffice.org 2 Guidebook” and is the definitive reference on the software: http://openoffice.blogs.com/bookresources/

OOoAuthors is a group of volunteers who have written a plethora of great books on the OpenOffice component applications. You can download any of them free as PDFs, or you can purchase the printed books from Lulu.com for a reasonable price. Links to all of these can be found on the site’s homepage: http://oooauthors.org/en

For online resources, NeoOffice maintains a user forum and a wiki where you can ask specific questions of the many users and volunteers who participate there.

NeoOffice Forums: http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums
NeoOffice Wiki: http://neowiki.neooffice.org/index.php/Main_Page

OpenOffice has its own official forum as well. Since the two programs are very similar in most functionality, you can also ask questions of the site users there:

http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/

In reviewing it just now, I came across the following thread that should be particularly useful for you: http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=11660

The books above should provide the step-by-step instructions for specific tasks. If you need more, then any book about OpenOffice should suffice, and you can also look into The INGOTS online training and certification program, at www.theingots.org, for online training materials (accredited in the UK, but quite useful here in the USA too).

Good luck, and let me know if you have further questions!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 11:09 am and is filed under Free Culture, Mac, Open Source, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.