[Bradford] Bradford CVS series

[John Hudson]

Here is the first piece for the Bradford CVS series. Any comments please by Sunday pm. I'll email the final version on Monday am.

John

OpenOffice is a free office suite that offers the most commonly used features of Microsoft Office; it looks more like Office 2003 but will read Office 2007 files. You can download it from www.openoffice.org. When you first run it, it asks for a name to put in document properties; if more than one person is going to use it, you can leave that blank. It also offers you the chance to register with Sun, who maintain the software, but that too is optional.

When you open your first document, go to Tools>Options which will give you a chance to add more information to the document properties; under View, you can change the icon style; under Load/Save>General you can alter the time between automatic saves and under Load/Save>Microsoft make some things automatically saved in MS Office compatible formats; under Language>Writing Aids you can turn on automatic spell-checking; under OO Writer>General you can alter the measurement unit if you prefer inches to centimetres. As with most free software, you have a lot of choice in how you want things to work

When you save a new document you will be offered the new international format, ODF, but, if you click on the down arrow to the right of the ODF format, you will find a list of alternative formats including the XP .doc format. When you save a document that is already in a Microsoft format, you will be offered the chance to save it in ODF but, if you are always going to use Microsoft formats, you can turn this off.

More on using OpenOffice Writer which is a direct replacement for Word next time.

John Hudson 
www.bradlug.co.uk