CyberNotes: Best OpenOffice Extensions

Dec 18

CyberNotes: Best OpenOffice Extensions

Time Saving Tuesday

Back in October 2006 the free OpenOffice 2.0.4 was released, and one of the big new features that it shipped with was an extension management system similar to that of Firefox. With it, developers are able to create add-ons that are easily incorporated into the suite of applications.

In the last year, extension development hasn’t really seemed to takeoff like I had expected it to, but that doesn’t mean that there is a shortage of extensions. There are a little over 60 extensions available, many of which are template packages in different languages. We went through all of the extensions, tested over a dozen of them, and picked our favorite five…

–PhotoAlbum (Homepage)–

The PhotoAlbum extension is extremely straightforward. You must be using OpenOffice Impress (the presentation creator), and you’ll find the gallery option by going to Tools -> Add-Ons -> Create Photo Album. After that you’ll be prompted to browse for the directory where your images have been saved. Once the directory is selected, all of your photos will immediately be put into a presentation with one image per slide, and random transitions will be applied.

OpenOffice Photo Album

–Google Docs (Homepage)–

If you use Google Docs this will be a pretty handy extension. With it you can retrieve your documents from Google, or save a document using the new Google Docs menu item that the extension will add. Unfortunately it still needs a little interaction with the server to get it to work. For example, when importing a document it will actually pull up a download page in your browser that automatically saves the file in the OpenOffice document format. So everything isn’t handled in OpenOffice, but it is still a nice addition.

OpenOffice Google Docs