Timberline Employee Blog

Most companies have a number of business they deal with that offer support.

Why not make a help card that employees can refer to with the most common and/or most important two or three numbers called? Here is an example:

I recently found out the Chrysler employee discount at Verizon isn’t too bad when I bought a new phone.

https://signup.verizonwireless.com/DaimlerChrysler/Daimler%20Dealership%20Announcement%20Page.pdf 

One thing that makes great pdf documents is a hyperlinked table of contents.  OpenOffice is a good tool to do this with.  The OpenOffice 2.2.1 documentation is not clear on how to do this so I will explain it some more and it should make sense.

First you want to have some content in OpenOffice writer with labeled content sections. So if you had a document that looked like this:

Section 1

This is all about what is in section 1.  I could write more but you get the point.

Section 2

This is a bit more in depth of what we touched upon earlier.

First highlight ‘Section 1′ and change its format to Heading 1.  Do the same for ‘Section 2′ also changing its format to Heading 1.  Position your cursor where you want your table of contents. Now click Insert/Indexes and Tables/Index and Tables… Click the Entries tab.

For each heading level you want hyperlinks in your table of contents do the following.  Remember earlier you used Heading 1 for a format type. For Heading level 1, click on 1 in the Level field which is probably already selected. Next to the level field is the Structure area.  Find the button marked F.  Click in the blank area before this button, between the F button and the button before it. There should now be a flashing cursor where you clicked. Click the Hyperlink button. Now find the area inbetween the F button and the button that follows it and click there. Then click Hyperlink again.

You should now notice three things. You should have two new buttons surrounding the F button in the Structure area. If you have preview checked on, you should also see that Heading 1 is now underlined and blue indicating that it is a hyperlink.  Go ahead and click ok to create/save your table of contents.

Now when you export your document as a PDF file make sure Tagged PDF is checked. Also make sure you save the document in OpenOffice or some other file format other than PDF so you can edit it later.  A PDF file is a compiled file that is not designed to manipulate after it has been created.  It is designed so that it looks the same on multiple platforms.

Let me preface that everybody has a favorite word processor. There are others out there and I’d be glad to hear about the free ones that work well for you.

OpenOffice is one of the best productivity suites to come around in a long time and here is why. Most people who use an office productivity suite do not use it for anything more than typing up a letter or sometimes calculating in a small spreadsheet. Most people in an office environment who don’t know there are viable and quite usable alternatives use Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel to do these tasks. These programs are horribly overpriced and bloated for simple tasks. I reserve my MS Word and Excel licenses for my power users.

The OpenOffice versions of these programs are Writer and Calc. OpenOffice reads and writes Microsoft formatted documents with ease. When you open an existing document OpenOffice will save in whatever format it was originally. However when you create a new document and you wish to share this document with a Microsoft user, you will need to select “Save As”. In Writer select the save as type “Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP (.doc)” and in Calc select the save as type “Microsoft Excel 97/2000/XP (.xls)”. It is that easy.

Here is a fun tip that Microsoft Office XP can’t do. In OpenOffice File menu select “Export as PDF”. This will create an Adobe PDF file viewable on every platform with a PDF viewer. Most people have this viewer installed already. When you have “Tagged PDF” selected in the export screen your PDF file will also contain the hyperlinks, if any, from your source document. So if your document had a link to go a particular web page, your tagged PDF would also have this link. There are installable print drivers like the doPDF project that allow you to print to a PDF file but these free ones so far do not allow you to keep embedded hyperlinks. PDF files are difficult for most people to edit once they are created because most people only have this PDF viewers installed. This makes them an excellent document format to use for quotes emailed to customers with the added benefit that your customer can view them on nearly any platform.

The significant difference between Word and Writer and Excel and Calc lies in the scripting engines. Spreadsheet formulas are not scripting code. These formulas read just fine between Excel and Calc. Documents that make use of the scripting engines are high level documents that are literally programs in and of themselves. For Microsoft products these types of documents would have Visual Basic code embedded. It is not likely that you will come across these types of documents here.

Finally Microsoft provides viewers for Word and Excel. If you come across Word or Excel documents that just are not viewing or printing correctly then one of these viewers could help you out. The viewers are free. The actual Microsoft Office program to edit the files is what costs so much.

So when somebody here says “I need Excel” or “I need Word” I respond with, “You already have something better installed on your desktop. Look for a folder called OpenOffice.org.

File formats talked about in this article:
.doc - Microsoft Word
.xls - Microsoft Excel
.pdf - Adobe Acrobat
.odt – OpenOffice OpenDocument Text
.sxw – OpenOffice.org 1.0 Text Document
.ods – OpenOffice OpenDocument Spreadsheet
.sxc – OpenOffice.org 1.0 Spreadsheet