Welcome to OOoAuthors!

This is a development site for OpenOffice.org documentation. If you just want to read documentation, see our published chapters: PDF and ODT (on this website) or PDF only (on the OpenOffice.org website).

We are a group of volunteer reviewers, writers, editors, proofreaders, indexers, and translators producing documentation for OpenOffice.org Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress, and Base. This is the English section. We also have documents in German, Dutch, Romanian, and other languages.

See below for priority help needed.

Printed books for sale

Printed copies of five of our books are available from the Friends of OpenDocument Inc.'s store at Lulu.com:
Getting Started with OpenOffice.org 2.x - Fourth Edition - NEW May 2008
OpenOffice.org 2.x Writer Guide - Third Edition
OpenOffice.org 2.x Impress Guide
OpenOffice.org 2.x Draw Guide - Second edition - NEW April 2008
OpenOffice.org 2.0 Migration Guide

How you can help at OOoAuthors

We are working on the User Guide for OOo 3.0.

The priority is on writing about new and significantly changed features, some of which are listed on the OOo Marketing Team's website. See also OOo Ninja and other third party sites for information about new features.

All chapters in all books need to be checked against the beta version of OOo3.0, because many dialog boxes have changed in minor ways, even if the basic functionality hasn't changed.

In addition, the Migration Guide not only needs checking for new and/or changed things about OOo itself, but would really benefit from additional material related to migrating from MS Office 2007.

We always need more volunteers, and everyone is welcome, no matter what your level of experience is. We'll even train you in reviewing and technical writing as well as in other necessary publishing functions, such as indexing or proofreading. You can also take advantage of this project in order to gain some practical experience in the publishing industry.

Reviewers, indexers, and proofreaders needed!

Even if you are new to OOo or have no writing experience, you can be a great help by reviewing chapters or indexing and proofreading documents prior to their publication.

See below for an introduction to reviewing.

Writers needed!

Top priority items seeking writers:

Calc Guide

An early, incomplete draft of a book for OOo 2.x is here. It needs someone to write the missing chapters and bring everything up to date for OOo3.0. Chapters that have been updated are on the Review List and are in this folder.

Database Guide

Work on this book has started and stalled several times. More help is needed, and very welcome. Draft outline is here.

FAQs

These have been moved to the OOo wiki. They need updating and new ones written.

Want to write tutorials, short how-to's, or something else? We can find a place for it. Join our mailing list and tell us your ideas.

Getting started

1. Join the OOoAuthors site.
2. Join the mailing list. You might want to view the messages in the mailing list archives.
3. Request author role (reviewers, indexers, or proofreaders as well as writers need this).
4. If you don't have it already, download and install the most recent developer build (beta) of OOo3.0. You need this for both testing OOo3 and writing about it. If you need a stable version of OOo (2.x) for other work, you can get the latest version here. You should be able to run both 2.x and 3.0 on the same computer without them conflicting with each other.
5. Join the OOoAuthors Forum. This is where we coordinate and keep track of who's doing what, and collect ideas for new projects and improvements to existing work.

What to do

• Option 1: Review a current chapter. <--- New members!
• Option 2: Write a new chapter.

Review a current chapter

(This section is a summary. Click here for more information.)

The best way to get started is to review a chapter. This is a short-term task, and it helps you get acquainted with the project.

In addition to checking chapters against the latest version of the software, you can help by (a) noting any questions you have that are not answered in the current chapter; and (b) doing some research in the OOoForum and the OOo Users list to see what questions other people have.

See this page for more information on what's needed.

1. Read the Style Guide, the Writing OOo Guides, and the Template How-to.
2. Pick a document to review and inform the list.
3. When you are done, upload the file and inform the list.
4. To work on updating a chapter for OOo 3.0, pick a published 2.x chapter. After reviewing it, upload it to the relevant folder for User Guide 3.

License

We have a document explaining our choice of license.

Cool OOoAuthors shirts, caps, mugs and more

Want to advertise OOoAuthors where you work or play? You can get many items featuring the OOoAuthors logo here: http://www.cafepress.com/oooauthors. All items are being sold at cost.

European OOoAuthors-shop
Now, there's a European shop too... :)
You'll find different things here - if you want some more, or different colours or ... please let me know. I can add more articles. -- Sigrid