Tired of paying tribute to the latest Microsoft Office suite? Each year or so, Microsoft Office comes out with an upgrade. Usually, powerful new features are introduced. But haven’t you wondered how many of these, or indeed of existing features, do you actually use?

Herein, the book shows you a viable and free alternative. Perry does say forthrightly that Microsoft Office has more features than OpenOffice, and for certain operations, is easier to use. (Fewer steps.)

But he then goes onto explain the very many existing capabilities of OpenOffice. You should see right up that the Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw are very polished. A lot of thought has gone into making the usability as easy as possible. Hopefully, the book might indicate that OpenOffice’s choices of menus and actions is very intuitive. Its designers do not want to cede any ground to Microsoft on the usability issues.

One thing to note is that you can experiment, by just trying out one of the OpenOffice packages, in lieu of its Microsoft counterpart. While still using the rest of the Microsoft suite. A low risk approach, backed up by the book’s advice on the program you’re testing.
by W Boudville, Rating: 4 / 5

OpenOffice has some fine points, and in some areas can do things Microsoft Office finds impossible – live connection to a database being one of them. Unfortunately there is very little documentation available anywhere to get to grips with automation or the finer points of working with server based Open Source databases such as MySQL, a program that is probably the world’s favourite Open Source database solution.

I bought this book hoping it would enable me to get to grips with OpenOffice as a complete package. However, the “All in One” label seems misplaced as in more than one place the authors plainly state that they do not want to cover the database connection issues, but focus instead on very simple matters like “How to Open a File” or “Printing” or even “How to Save your Work”. Oh dear.

Perhaps this omission is because there is very little information in the public domain for them to research and so they could not actually find out how to use OpenOffice in a more complex yet productive way. I would have hoped that any author claiming to be writing an “All in One” guide would have been able to work this out for themselves so they can pass on this knowledge to the rest of us. That’s why I buy books: to get help with the hard stuff.

This book may be of some use to complete computer beginners, or to non-technical staff who are being migrated onto the OpenOffice platform from a large Office suite and need to find their way around reliably.

I can’t see it being helpful to developers or to people who wish to use OpenOffice as part of an application that uses live data, or to people who need to perform repetitive tasks hundreds of times and need help understanding how to adapt the software to their own individual needs.

A shame, because the software program itself seems rather good. I just wish I could find a book that fully explains the difficult stuff to me, and doesn’t patronise me with banal “how tos” of rather intuititive actions that most people can figure out in less than two minutes.

I do appreciate the book is probably not aimed at geeky IT nerds, but I do not work in IT yet still need rather a lot more than this book offers. All in One it certainly isn’t.
by SwissMac, Rating: 2 / 5

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