Rating: 

For someone already familiar with word processing applications this book is a great help in showing how OpenOffice.org Writer accomplishes the task. It is written for someone who has experience in this type of software. As the subtitle is “The Free Alternative to Microsoft Word” you can imagine that much of the differences she shows are differences between Writer and Word.

The author does a great job at showing what can and cannot be done with OOo. She does not pretend that OOo Writer is perfect and is quick to show how to avoid some common pitfalls. The book is refreshing in that it does admit some weaknesses of the software, but also provides ways around the problems.

Because it is written for current users of word processors, it gives few examples of what can be done with the features. If you already know what you want to accomplish but are unsure of how it is done in Writer, then this book is a great help.

One of the strengths of OOo is “Styles.” The author explained how to use styles in a very concise manner. The only thing lacking was a thorough explanation as to why someone should use styles. Other word processors handle formatting on a paragraph to paragraph, or word to word basis. OOo handles its formatting through styles, though you can do it the wrong way if you like. Styles are document wide formating and is much more powerful. But the book lacked the convincing paragraph or two as to why one should try to learn to use the Stylist.

There are lots of screen captures. Of which 183 are dialog boxes or menus. The other 8 show something other than those 2 items. Precisely two, and only two are an example of actual text being formated. The problem I have with this is if I go through the steps that are given in the book, I can, without fail, end up at the same dialog box as the book references. What would have been more to my liking would have been to see more examples of how you can use OOo to put text on a page.

The saving grace of this though is the one huge example that the book shows of what can be done with OOo...the entire book was written in and typeset from OOo Writer. Anything you see in the book can be done with the OOo Writer program. That is a testimony to the power of the tool. Because of this, the author goes into great detail as to how to manage large documents with Writer. This is something that OOo does very well. With its Stylist to help manage the uniform formatting and the Navigator to help manage a large document, OOo not only competes for MS Word's secretarial market, but WordPerfect's dominance in the legal and governmental fields.

I look forward to the release of OpenOffice.org 2.0. I hope that O'Reilly will work with the author to produce a new version of the book in line with the new version and features of the software. As well, I would like to see O'Reilly do a book on each of the components in the OpenOffice.org suite.