CAE does not officially endorse or will promote any one Office suite over another. We do, however, recommend that users within the College of Engineering, use the office suite from OpenOffice.org on Linux for its availability and compatibility with Office suites on Windows machines. A productivity suite available on Linux is OpenOffice. The main project page is found at http://www.openoffice.org/. This page contains information about features, setup guides and current status of the project. The following is an overview of the OpenOffice suite.

• Overview of OpenOffice
• Compatible File Types
• OpenOffice System Requirements
• Installing OpenOffice on Debian

Overview of OpenOffice OpenOffice has been built to have a similar look and functionality as the Microsoft Office suite. The menus are in similar locations with many of the same option names and functions. Open office includes spell check and even Autospell check (the squiggly redline under misspelled words). Programs included in the OpenOffice.org package:

• Text Document (Word)
• Spreadsheet (Excel)
• Presentation (PowerPoint)
• Drawing

All the programs included in the OpenOffice.org Office package have the following features:

• Auto-pilot (Templates)
• Stylist (Stylesheets)
• Spell Check
• AutoCorrect dictionary (Spell check)
• AutoFormat (Guess common words)
• Text Frames and linking
• Built in option to create pdfs

Templates The initial install of OpenOffice does not come with many templates such as backgrounds for presentations, a memo, or a fax. There are however sites where they can be downloaded from: http://documentation.openoffice.org/Samples_Templates/User/template/index.html OpenOffice Text Document OpenOffice can generate table of contents, bibliographical references, illustrations, tables and other objects. The standard extension that the OpenOffice Text Document saves to is *.sxw; however it is possible to save a document in the following formats that the created documents are compatible with other Office suites. The formats that a document can be saved to are:

• Microsoft word (*.doc)
• Rich Text format (*.rtf)
• Starwriter (*.sdw)
• text (*.txt)
• HTML (*.html)

OpenOffice Calc The standard extension that the OpenOffice 1.0 Spreadsheet saves to is *.sxc; however it is possible to save the Spreadsheet in the following formats that the created documents are compatible with other Office suites. The formats that it can save to:

• Microsoft Excel and templates (.xls and .xlt)
• StartCalc and template (.sdc and .vor)
• HTML format (.html)

OpenOffice Impress The standard extension that the OpenOffice 1.0 Presentation saves to is *.sxi; however it is possible to save the Presentation in the following formats so that the presentation is compatible with other Office suites. The formats that it can save to:

• Microsoft PowerPoint 97/2000/XP (.ppt)
• StarImpress (.sdd)

Compatibility of OpenOffice with other Office suites: File formats that OpenOffice can open the program that the format opens into is in parentheses () with Text for OpenOffice Text Document, Calc for OpenOffice Spreadsheet and Presentation meaning OpenOffice Presentation:

• OpenOffice.org Text Document
• OpenOffice.org 1.0 Spreadsheet
• OpenOffice.org 1.0 Presentation
• OpenOffice.org 1.0 Drawing
• Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP (Text)
• Microsoft Excel 97/2000/XP (Calc)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (Presentation)
• Rich Text Format (Text or Calc)
• Starwriter (Text)
• StarCalc (Calc)
• StarImpress (Presentation)
• StarDraw (Presentation or Drawing)
• Text *.txt (Text or Calc)
• Html document (Text, Calc or Presentation)
• BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG Portable Network Graphic, PSD Adobe Photoshop (Drawing)

OpenOffice Linux system Requirements The System requirements for Linux installations:

• PC with Pentium or compatible processor
• Linux kernel 2.2.13 or higher
• glibe2 v.2.2.0 or higher
• x server with a 800 x 600 screen resolution or better with windows manager
• at least 128 MB of RAM

The following distributions have OpenOffice installed by default:

• Suse
• Redhat
• Fedora

OpenOffice is not automatically installed on:

• Debian

Installing OpenOffice.org on Debian OpenOffice.org does not come installed on the standard Debian install. It can be installed using the apt-get command (apt-HOWTO)

1. Add one of the mirrors for the openoffice.org files to the /etc/apt/sources.list. Debian mirrors for OpenOffice.org can be found at - http://openoffice.debian.net/mirrors.html
2. Once the mirror has been added to the source list type the following into a terminal window apt-get update; apt-get install openoffice.org to download the files.
3. Now that the files are on the system, you will need to run the Openoffice.org setup. From the 'K' menu (if running KDE) navigate to the OpenOffice.org entry and then to 'OpenOffice.org Setup'

More information about installing OpenOffice on Debian and instructions on how to install OpenOffice from source on Debian can be found at: http://openoffice.debian.net/install.html Setup Guides can be found at: http://documentation.openoffice.org/setup_guide/index.html Back to top