The article mentions several features that particularly appeal to users of older (pre-2007) versions of MS Office who have been reluctant to move to newer versions: unlike Office 2013, LibreOffice and OpenOffice “live and work entirely on your PC’s hard drive — there’s no prodding you toward cloud storage or app rental. Both suites use traditional toolbars (no Ribbon interface) and come with six business apps: word processor, spreadsheet, presentation creator, drawing/desktop-publishing tool, database manager, and mathematics tool…

“Although the two suites are similar, LibreOffice is a bit more evolved… For example, LibreOffice now supports more file formats than Open Office does…” (including opening, but not saving to, Microsoft Publisher files).

Lange says, “Is either of these open-source MS Office substitutes right for you? If your office-suite needs are relatively modest, the answer is most likely yes. On the other hand, if you’re regularly collaborating with businesses that use Office 2010 or 2013 and exact reproduction of spreadsheets, presentations, and text documents is essential, it’s safer to stick with Microsoft’s suite…

“I think LibreOffice is currently the better choice. It nicely does what I need done, quietly and without fanfare. It supports more file formats, including those used by the newest versions of Microsoft Office, and it has more developer momentum behind it. But that’s me; Open Office might work just as well or better for you…

“Bottom line: If you’re looking for an alternative to Microsoft Office that isn’t cloud-oriented, that uses traditional toolbars, and that’s totally free, you probably won’t go wrong with LibreOffice or Open Office!”

You don’t need expensive software to write, design, and create PDFs for self-published, print-on-demand books. LibreOffice Writer is free, easy to use, and has powerful page layout features suitable for producing books such as novels and short story or poetry collections. This book explains how to write, edit, and design a book; lay out the pages using styles and templates; build a table of contents and index; include pictures, graphics, and special effects; and create a PDF for submission to POD services.

Printed copies are available from Lulu.com for US$15.37. Pay at Lulu.com.

Download PDF here. Cost is US$5.00, on the honor system. Please pay using the button below (Paypal or credit card). This book has no DRM; you may copy it onto as many of your devices as you wish. If you buy a printed copy, you are welcome to a free copy of the PDF.

7 Must Have Social Media Business Tools for Influence, Authority and Time Management is a related article. I am familiar with only one of the tools mentioned (Tweetdeck) although I may have heard of one or two of the others. I suspect this means I’m hopelessly behind the times.

Presented at the LibreOffice Conference, Berlin, October 2012.

I did not produce any slides for this talk. My rough notes are here: OpenHelp Talk (PDF).

An excerpt from my resignation letter, and related comments, are here.

I intend to become more involved with The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project.

I am honored to appear in a book containing essays by some of the field’s leaders whom I admire greatly, including Carolyn Rude, Michelle Corbin, Geoff Hart, and George Hayhoe (an incomplete list).

This presentation covers how to develop editing standards for content. It provides tips on how to get started when no conventions exist and how to improve coverage of topics when time and resources are limited. It describes how to get buy-in for editing standards from management and project members. This topic is of interest to all editors because pushback against editing changes is very common, and consistency is difficult to maintain without coworkers’ buy-in to established standards.

Editors are really valuable, and, the way things are going, undervalued. These are people who are good at process. They think about calendars, schedules, checklists, and get freaked out when schedules slip. Their jobs are to aggregate information, parse it, restructure it, and make sure it meets standards. They are basically QA for language and meaning.