8 OpenOffice Extensions, Add-ons and Templates for Writers

Over the past couple of years, OpenOffice seems to have gone from “That Free Office Clone For People Who Can’t Afford MS Office to “Why Pay For Office when I have OpenOffice?”

There’s a couple of good reasons for this beyond the price. OpenOffice is multi-platform. You can run it on Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris. It runs off a pen drive if needed. It has features missing from Office like the ability to export in PDF. Users have an often bewildering ability to control the look and feel of OpenOffice (Yet Theming still sucks).

And it has extensions. Lots and lots of extensions that add functionality and customize OPenOffice to help you produce more.

Here’s a few of the extensions I have installed at the moment:

For Writer:

Writer’s Tools- One of the best all around Extensions- Everyone should have this installed.� Offers several tools that should be included in Open Office anyway- Backup files to FTP or Amazon, thesaurus, visual word count, easy notes and tasks and more. It’s a little tricky to install- Make sure you understand how to link the database� to get all the features. But a definite must have

Writer’s extras- A few other features that didn’t make the cut, but worth a download. Adds a menu� on Writer for Microblogging, Transliterate and easy Markups.

Openoffice.org2GoogleDocs- import and export files to Google Docs and Zoho. Writer’s tools has similar features, but this gets added to the Quickstart Menu.

Alternative Dialog Find and Replace- Provides a full featured and more useful find and replace than the standard

Professional Templates II-A collection of 120 templates. Posters, Projects, Letters and more.

Book Template- Stephen has developed a great template for writers. Under construction, but regularly updated and has a good community being built around it. Allows you to enter text in a variety of styles for Character� and plot notes, summaries, random noise, etc., then hide these styles when printing out a final copy. Pretty neat.

ccooo- Puts a Creative Commons license on your work.

Language Tool- Simple Grammar Checker.

For PDF:

Sun PDF Importer- Writer will export to PDF, but doesn’t really edit in PDF Format. Infact, there’s no real free PDF Editor that works well, but this does a decent job. Read the home page for information on how to use it and its limitations.

If there are any other extensions out there you like using, let me know.

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