Free OpenOffice.org Training Videos

Rollie Hawk writes "Having trouble converting your family and office mates into OpenOffice devotees? NewsForge (Owned by the same people that bring you Slashdot) can now help you convince the visual learners around you that they can do it. NewsForge is releasing a series of free video segments that demonstrate OpenOffice in action from installation to day-to-day use. According to the site, these clips will play on any browser on any operating system as long as Flash is available. One practical topic that should be particularly interesting to the would-be business converts is 'making a slide presentation in a hurry.'"

Re:Very useful, but... slow?

[saskboy]

Open up OO.o 2 and go to:
-Tools.

-Options

-Java

Disable Java, and it will open about twice as fast. I hear it disables macros or something that most users will never use. Hopefully in 2.1 they'll disable Java by default, and load it up slowly in the background after the application is open and being used.

Thank you!

[CyricZ]

Those videos look fantastic. They should really help out with getting people to convert to OpenOffice.org.

Indeed, a massive Thanks! to everyone who has contributed to them.

Perhaps it is time for similar videos to be put out regarding the use of Firefox, Seamonkey, and other such open source projects. Ruby on Rails has some tutorial videos like that, and they're very helpful, too.

My brother refused to try OpenOffice.org

[kimvette]

until he started working for me. On his machine I did not give him a choice - for his office apps he can use OpenOffice.org or simply not work. Now that he's used it for a week he has discovered that he can do everything he needs in the OOo suite and is going to be installing it on his home PC. He hasn't run into performance issues with large files yet, but by the time he does I expect the OOo will have addressed at least some of those issues.

He was a Microsoft Office fan prior to this week (and to be fair, Microsoft Office IS an excellent product) but now sees that MS Office is not the only available option in the real world.

Re:Good idea

[guice]

Acrobat Reader loads in a flash for me. It just takes a bit of Liposuction [theinquirer.net] (Plug-in requirements slightly different for Acrobat7, but not by much).

Re:Program to make those 'videos'?

[seeken]

probably this vnc to swf recorder:

http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/ [unixuser.org]

Re:Program to make those 'videos'?

[ashitaka]

There are several screen capture to SWF generators:

1) Captivate [macromedia.com].
2) Viewletbuilder [qarbon.com].
3) Wink [debugmode.com].

Re:Program to make those 'videos'?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wink is open source and makes better looking videos than those shown.

http://www.debugmode.com/wink/ [debugmode.com]

I have never tried using it with audio though. I always just go with a text note and a next button.

Re:Great effort! But...

[Roblimo]

But...you're only looking at *some* videos from a CD that accompanies a book, Point & Click OpenOffice.org [amazon.com], that'll be in bookstores by mid-December. You only saw an excerpt of the complete work, which goes into lots more depth than what you've seen. Plus I'll be making and posting more videos soon. Email me (robin at roblimo dot com) with your suggestions. I'll (obviously) start with the ones for which I get the most requests.

Format choice side note: Like it or not, Flash offers the most bandwidth-efficient way to reach the most computer users, on the most platforms. Those who want to redistribute these videos in other file formats are welcome to do so as long as they preserve attribution and all that (Creative Commons License), although I'd suggest emailing me to get AVI or MPEG copies instead of trying to retrack the compressed Flash versions. This will give a better end result.

I'd also like to point out that these videos are primarily for Windows users, not for the slick Linux crowd that reads Slashdot, which is why they're relaxed and kind of fumbly (so they don't intimidate people who aren't comfortable with computers). This also explains the eMachine box. I needed something with Windows and it was on sale cheap. My "real" computers run Linux, just as you'd expect. :)

- Robin