One of the things that OpenOffice has always seemed to lack is an abundance of clipart and templates. Those are things that people use all of the time for making presentations, writing reports, creating budgets, and more.
These features and more are all available by installing a branch off of the OpenOffice suite called OxygenOffice Pro. It is free and open source even though we have become accustomed to “Pro” software costing money. The homepage for OxygenOffice is in German, but here is an English translation provided by Google.
It would be a little nicer if this was just an addon for OpenOffice, but instead it is a completely separate application with some new features added. Is it worth downloading? I really liked the idea of the program, but a lot of the clipart was terrible. Microsoft’s clipart isn’t all that great either, but it’s better than what this offers.
Here’s a list of features included in OxygenOffice:
- Extensive collection of over 3,400 free clipart and photos (found under Tools -> Gallery)
- 90 different fonts are included
- Additional documentation and tools, like OOoWikipedia for searching Wikipedia, are also included
- Lots of templates for doing things like writing resumes, creating budgets, and more
- Improvements to the OpenOffice PDF exporter
- Can import Office 2007 documents
One of the things that you’ll have to consider when using this is that application updates will be delayed. They just released OxygenOffice 2.3 even though OpenOffice 2.3 was available over a month ago. I guess this is a good solution if you need the features mentioned above, but otherwise you should stick with the classic OpenOffice.
Download OxygenOffice Pro from SourceForge
[via Download Squad & MakeUseOf]
UPDATE: As Joe pointed out in the comments below this is also available as an OpenOffice extension, which makes it a bit more appealing.
Lifehacker’s coverage of this described it as either an extension or a full download. They say that you can install it into your existing oo.org using Tools -> Extension Manager
[lifehacker.com]
Woah! There is a separate section on SourceForge for the extension. I didn’t see any mention of that on their site. Thanks for pointing that out Joe.
The extension is a way to keep sticking to StarO sister. But I prefer to stay with OOo as is and manage cliparts myself when needed.
Numerous templates are downloadable on their own as far as I know. …Gonna verify that right now for I have a doubt. Though…
If you don’t like the clip art, would you know som places where to download better clip are, that is free or for fee?
K
OpenOffice doesn’t provide some templates online, but the selection is quite limited:
[documentation.openoffice.org]
@K-PlanBForOpenOffice: launch a g.search with “free clip-art”, think you’ll get some sites this way. Just mind the quality.
@Ryan: exactly.
@K-PlanB: I forgot to mention you can get cliparts and more by downloading StarOffice (a Sun 80$ built on/with Oo product) from Google/GooglePack, checking only the StarOffice software to download, provided you have already at least one google pack product.
They are not (all) the same cliparts as in Oo extension, and some adds and features are not in Oo. Some.
Also, StarOffice clip-arts and templates can be made compatible with Oo. So, it’s up to you to decide which of both products you want to keep.
I actually prefer StarOffice over OpenOffice just for that reason. I’m so glad that Google is offering it for free.
Here is the English version of this website:
[sourceforge.net]
@Ryan.
I’ve just switched to Star Office. I still wonder why I didn’t want to clutter my registry by avoiding the install. Maybe the fact I do like apps portability. But, comparing intense use and features, I must say it’s more practical than running Oo from another usb device. But I keep Oo on a stick somewhere! And thanks, Google and Sun.
Thanks to your daily news and all, too. Your site is worthy being known!
That’s not really an English version of the same site though. It’s just the Sourceforge homepage. The actual homepage provides a lot more details as to how it works.
I’m glad to hear that you’re giving Star Office a shot. I’ve played with it quite a bit, and haven’t noticed too much of a difference between that and OpenOffice. But hey, it’s still free and it does have its upsides.
[clker.com] is an ODG version of openclipart.org you can directly embed images in openoffice docs using insert->ole->from file and pasting the link of the image.