OpenOffice : Java Glossary

Similar to MS Office suite, a word processing with databases and more. The current version is 4.1.1 Last revised/verified: 2014-08-22. It is open source and uses open data formats. Its free. Beware of fraudsters selling it. StarOffice is the commercial version. StarOffice and OpenOffice borrow code from each other. The version at openoffice.org is maintained by Sun. I found the competitor the free LibreOffice clearly superior.

It does not work identically to Microsoft, but it is more stable.

OpenOffice saves in either Microsoft or Open format. Open format is more compact because it is automatically compressed. An Open Office document is like a set of XML (extensible Markup Language) documents collected together and PKZipped. Documents take up only about 1/3 as much disk space as the corresponding MS Word document.

Tips

• OpenOffice will install a (possibly obsolete) version of Java for its use that will show up in the Java control panel. Don’t remove it. Alternatively, in options, you can reconfigure Open Office to use a more up-to-date JRE (Java Runtime Environment). Then you can uninstall the old one.
• When adding auto corrects, (aka autocorrects) make sure you add them to the locale of the documents you are creating. Otherwise, they will not be applied.
• OpenOffice is unbelievably slow at bringing up the auto corrects menu. Just be patient and write an email to the OpenOffice people asking them to fix this. There is no excuse. I suspect the problem is a 76-character overhead per autocorrect. Somebody used an unusually fluffy format (even for XML) abeit zipped. It would be much faster as a CSV (Comma-Separated Value) or field-per-line text file. They probably thought users would only have a dozen or so auto corrects so the overheaod would not matter. Even compressed, a mere 370 autocorrects take 803 KB.
• Autocorrects will not work in a text with a non-matching locale. To fix the locale of an entire document type Select the entire text with Ctrl-A then click Tools ⇒ Language ⇒ For selection ⇒ select the language. Select language For All Text does not work.
• If you accidentally add large numbers of autocorrects to the wrong locale, use a fix like this:
  CD (Compact Disc) C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\OpenOffice.org\3\user\autocorr\
  rem copy desired autocorrects on top of locale without them.
  copy acor_en-CA.dat acor_en-US.dat
  The problem with this trick is new autocorrects will not automatically go into both locales.
• Canadian spell check does not work by default. Use the Tools ⇒ Options ⇒ Language ⇒ Writing Aids ⇒ Available Language Modules Edit ⇒ Get More dictionaries online ⇒ search to install the Canadian dictionary. Alternatively, use the American locale and add Canadian spellings as an override, e.g. works like labour, honour, theatre, colour, metre, centre…
• If your autocorrects stop working, or some of your autocorrects stop working, chances are part of your document is marked as some other language than the one your autocorrects are set up for. Use Tools ⇒ Language ⇒ for all text to mark your entire document to the language of your autocorrects (unless, of course, parts of it are in a different language).

Gotchas

• If you capitalise an autocorrect, it expands to the same text had you typed it the autocorrect in lower case. You need two autocorrects, one upper case and one lower case.
• The trick to making Calc draw a chart is to select both the x and y data before you start and to select a chart type that explicitly mentions X and Y. Otherwise you will just effectively get a bar chart on Y ignoring the values of X.