Although OpenOffice.org is a competent productivity suite, you can add some nifty features to it using extensions. There are hundreds of nifty extensions available in the official extension repository. Some of them add a feature or two, while others take OpenOffice.org to a whole new level. The AuthorSupportTool (AST) extension  belongs to the latter category. AST not just adds some random features to OpenOffice.org Writer, it dramatically enhances the word processor’s functionality, turning it into a powerful tool for working on research papers and complex documents.

By Dmitri Popov

Since AST is a standard OpenOffice.org extension, installing it is easy. Grab the latest .oxt package, launch OpenOffice.org, choose Tools -> Extension Manager, press Add, select the downloaded extension, and press Open. Restart OpenOffice.org and you are done.

Once installed, AST adds a separate AuthorSupportTool menu which gives you quick access to all the extension’s features. So let’s take a look at the most interesting tools on offer.

 Template Wizard

The first item on the menu is Template Wizard. As the name suggests, this feature lets you create a template for your documents in a few simple steps. Using the wizard, you can specify a template type (e.g., Paper, Bachelor Report, Master Thesis, etc), topic (e.g., Title, Subtitle, and Keywords), author data, page layout, and fonts.

 Manage sources editor

AST comes with its own bibliographical and reference tool which can come in handy when you work on a research paper or another project that requires this type of functionality. The Sources menu item contains two commands: Manage reference styles and Manage sources. The former opens the reference style editor which you can use to specify desired reference styles. The Manage sources command gives you access to the sources editor which you can use to enter and manage quotes, images, and tables. The sources editor also lets you easily insert any of the stored items into the current document as well as generate a bibliography and indexes.

The Focal Points editor is another useful tool, and you can access it via the Manage focal points command. You can think of the focal points editor as a graphical non-hierarchical outliner which you can use to manage the document structure as a flowchart. The clever part here is that once the flowchart is ready, you can convert it into the traditional document structure where each node (or focal point in AST’s terminology) becomes a document heading. To do this, press the Generate button, and AST converts the flowchart and inserts the resulting headings into the current document.

 Work progress

Keeping track of your progress is crucial when working on complex projects, and AST sports a rather clever Work progress feature that allows you to do just that. This tool provides a visual timeline as well as essential info about the current document, including word and page count, number of illustrations and tables, and so on. Here you can also specify the duration of the project and set milestones.

Finally, AST sports a simple backup tool. Choose the Save as backup command, and AST saves the current version of the document in the document directory. You can then use the Restore backup command to revert the document to any of the saved versions of the document.

Final word

Obviously, not all OpenOffice.org Writer users need the functionality offered by the AuthorSupportTool extension. However, if you use Writer as your word processor of choice for writing papers and work on complex projects, AuthorSupportTool can prove to be an indispensable tool in your arsenal.

By Dmitri Popov

Visit Worldlabel.com for all your labels

The Open Clip Art Library grew from a project between Jon Phillips (of Fabricatorz) and Bryce Harrington, in early 2004. From humble beginnings, it has evolved into a massive collection of over 24,000 scalable vector images, all created by 1200+ artists from around the world.

The Open Clip Art Library is an increasingly useful and powerful platform, through which, all work uploaded to the site is dedicated to the public through Creative Commons’ “Public Domain Dedicated”. Anyone can download and use the entire SVG library for any purpose, including both free and commercial works!

OCAL now boasts an easily navigable collection, made possible by new thumbnail previews. It has now become much easier to search and download clip art that suits any situation. The new site layout includes an updated theme, from Andy Fitzsimon, that emphasizes user interaction by placing more importance on the portal to upload created work, as well as displaying selections from the ever-growing collection.

Behind the scenes, members of Fabricatorz, including, among others, Bassel Safadi, Michi, Ronaldo Barbachano, and Brad Phillips, have helped push The Open Clip Art Library onto the Aiki Framework. This new PHP + MYSQL platform allows programmers to easily create and work with content management systems from the web.

Please help support the new Open Clip Art site launch by registering (if you haven’t already) and uploading artwork of your own!.

Read the entire Announcement 2.0 here and at the Fabricatorz post.

by Nathan Willis

The open source 3-D modeler Blender can perform so many different jobs that it can get a little intimidating. In addition to designing three-dimensional objects, Blender can handle rigging, character animation, kinematics, video editing, video game design, and in fact almost the entire tool chain required to produce a 3-D movie. Fortunately, if you have more modest goals in mind — say, simply creating a 3-D logo, Blender can do the job without forcing you through the entire learning curve … if you know where to look for help.

“The Blender user interface; even at start-up it can be intimidating to the new user, so it is helpful to run through a tutorial just to familiarize yourself with the tools.”

LEARNING YOUR WAY AROUND

The Blender project actively provides training resources, including books and classes through the Blender Foundation, as a fund raising mechanism to support ongoing development. The Blender site includes a large collection of online tutorials, mostly contributed by project members, in HTML and video formats.

The Blender wiki also has tutorial and manual sections of its own, although you should expect that content on the wiki is more likely to be incomplete than material found on the main site. Finally, there is a wide array of external Blender resources produced by the community and Blender artists.

You will want to begin by familiarizing yourself with the Blender interface. For starters, consult the Blender User Interface Tutorial on the main site, which walks you through the various on-screen and menu interface elements, some Blender-specific terminology, and how to configure UI options to your liking. For example, Blender terminology refers to what most other applications would call the menu bar as the “info window,” and what most apps would call the tool palette as the “buttons window.”

You will also need to get familiar with the Blender UI’s color and widget schemes; the UI is implemented in OpenGL, not a standard toolkit like GTK+ or Qt, so it uses its own widgets that do not inherit the colors or active/inactive/gray-out look of other desktop applications. Finally, be prepared for the fact that Blender uses a tremendous number of key-combinations for commands and modifier keys (Shift, Alt, Control, and a combination of the three) in concert with left, right, and center mouse clicks. You may have difficulty following the Blender tutorials if you do not have a three-button (or more) mouse or a full-sized keyboard including a separate number pad. A good place to learn more in-depth info about the command and interface structure is the tutorial entitled The Blender Windows.

After you read both of those tutorials, check out the “Interface Concept and “3D Viewport” video tutorials; these will help reinforce the text with actual UI interaction demos. The wiki also has resources, including a Hotkey Reference, and a one-page, printable command and UI reference you can keep at your desk — which, you should note, is formatted for A4-sized paper.

YOUR FIRST EDITS

Of course, grokking the interface is only the means to an end; learning how to model is the real goal. The best general introduction to modeling itself is found in the online wikibook Blender 3D: Noob to Pro. The book covers beginner to advanced topics, but its “Learn to Model” chapter is second to none.

“A page from ‘Blender 3-D: Noob to Pro.’ This wikibook takes a very structured approach to teaching basic modeling.”

If you already understand 3-D modeling, some of the material may be repetitious, but for newcomers the chapter contains valuable explanations of concepts often tossed around in other tutorials, like meshes, views, materials, and NURBs. In addition to that, the modeling instructions start with simple geometry, such as extruding cubes from two-dimensional rectangles, and introduce concepts like subsurfaces and “creases” along the way to extend your simply geometry into more complex shapes.

There are other quality tutorials at the Blender site itself, most focusing on a particular modeling task. This is fortunate for new users because Blender’s tool set contains a lot of specialized functionality. Exactly how much you need to learn depends entirely on what you want to do. The A Simple Winter Scene tutorial, for example, focuses on basic mesh objects like spheres and cones, and explains how to create models with resizing, duplication, and other introductory techniques. The Hillside Tutorial, on the other hand, involves subdividing meshes and deforming objects by moving vertices and smoothing. Fun with NURBs explains surface curves, which you can manipulate with control points, and introduces smooth surfaces made with skinning.

“Working through the tutorials helps you understand concepts like subsurfaces while using simple models — before diving in to complex geometry.”

The Blender site’s video tutorial section contains video lessons on subdivision surfaces and working with materials and textures, but these are perhaps too advanced for the genuine newcomer. Check back, though, because new content is always being added.

The wiki section on modeling contains many more tutorials, including Introduction to Modeling and in-depth sections on meshes, curves, surfaces, and more. These tutorials tend not to receive frequent updates, however, and some remain unfinished, so it is probably best to consult them as reference material rather than to expect step-by-step instruction. However, some focus on specific techniques that may be of interest, such as extruding a shape along a path, so be sure you at least take a look.

Creating a Logo is a very practical tutorial; it describes the process of creating a three-dimensional logo from a 2-D drawing or image. The process is not the least bit painful. Roughly speaking, you can add the 2-D image as a background layer in Blender, then trace it with curves. The curves, when you fill them out with some depth, become the 3-D version of the original drawing, which you can render from any angle and with a variety of lighting effects.

“The ‘Creating a Logo’ is one of the more practical, since it focuses on a basic task and static imagery.”

OUTPUT

Naturally, whichever modeling techniques you use, you will eventually need to render your work in a standard image format. Blender 3D: Noob to Pro contains a good chapter on rendering; while incomplete in some places, it steps you through the overall rendering options, including camera placement, image formats, resizing output, and color palettes, as well as Blender’s built-in rendering options: shadows, environment maps, oversampling, ray tracing, and radiosity.

“Blender’s built-in renderer can perform a quick render of the scene almost instantaneously, but to get better final results you should read up on the options.”

If the lighting options discussed seem too complicated, you should consider taking a look at the tutorial entitled Radiosity, which explains how to do “global illumination” rendering. With the GI technique, you light the entire scene (from every angle) uniformly, without having to worry about lamps and shading. GI is a good option if your design is no-frills, and you are not worried about achieving a photo-realistic look.

Blender supports several other important rendering options, including the amusing “toon shading” that produces a flatter, cartoon-like look, and the ability to farm out rendering to external renderers like Yafray.

In general, achieving a good render involves a bit of trial-and-error. But it is a task simpler in scope than 3-D modeling itself, so even if you are completely new to 3-D and Blender, don’t be afraid to check out all of the rendering tutorials and experiment. After all, you want to create a memorable image, and rendering is the final step in that process. Don’t leave it to chance.

DIGGING FURTHER

You can’t learn Blender overnight, unfortunately, even if you only need to use a sub-set of its tools, such as producing static 3-D images. But that’s because, for most people, thinking in three dimensions is hard, and drawing in three dimensions (on a two-dimensional screen) is even harder. All of the techniques Blender offers to build 3-D models — meshes, skins, NURBs, extrusion — are just shortcuts to help you get from the design you can picture in your head to a concrete, well-defined model inside the computer. They take some getting used to, and more than that, they take practice. But there’s no reason to feel intimidated by them.

After you’ve worked your way through the tutorials mentioned here, consider going through a few others, such as the Intermediate and Advanced tutorials in the Blender site’s Modeling category, as well as the Materials and Light sections. Getting familiar with materials and lights can help you achieve significantly more realistic-looking final output.

You should also consider purchasing a Blender reference book, such as The Essential Blender, The Official Blender Guide, or Blender Basics. The material is similar to what you will find in the online references, but is guaranteed to be complete, professionally edited, and you can more easily bookmark and scribble notes into a printed volume than you can in your Web browser — a fact you should never overlook when learning a new subject.

You’ll find good online tutorials at other sites, too, such as tutorialized.com, cgtutorials.com, and elsewhere. Just as important is the online Blender community; check out blendernation.com and blenderunderground.com — both have tutorials, resources, and friendly community members who once started out as a complete newcomer to Blender as well.

By Nathan Willis

Office applications like OpenOffice.org can bring out the worst in people. The same people who wouldn’t dream of driving a car without a few lessons will start pounding away in a word processor as though it were a typewriter, ignoring basic features like styles and templates. In the end, they may produce the documents they want, but only with far more effort than is necessary. They might as well be pushing a car instead of turning the ignition key.

Nothing stops you if you really want to format manually, any more than anything prevents you from using the soles of your shoes to slow down a car instead of the brake. OpenOffice.org does nothing to stop you from indenting each new paragraph in Writer or setting each number format in a Calc cell on its own. For small, unusual documents, manual formatting may even be quicker.

By Bruce Byfield

But to insist, like some people I’ve heard, that any alternative is too hard to learn, or an attempt to restrict users’ freedom simply makes life difficult for yourself. Using styles takes a different perspective and may require more initial planning than manual formatting, but it makes reformatting much easier. It also makes tools like outline numbering or generating tables of contents far simpler to use.

That is true of any office application, but it is doubly so in OpenOffice.org, which is far more organized around styles than most of its counterparts. If you really want to get the most from OpenOffice.org, you need to start using styles, and know what they can do in each OpenOffice.org program.

STYLE BASICS

A style is a collection of formatting instructions that you set once and then apply as needed throughout a document. For instance, in Writer, you might create a title style for italicizing the names of all the books mentioned in your document. If you decided to put the document online, you could change all the italicized book titles to a bold font for easier reading by changing the style, instead of going through the document and changing each title individually and maybe missing one or two instances.

Similarly, you could create a first, right, and left page in Writer, and have the correct one appear automatically. In Calc, you could apply complex formatting to a cell with a single mouse click, or duplicate an object endlessly in Draw.

You can see a list of styles in any OpenOffice.org program by selecting Format -> Styles and Formatting, or by pressing the F11 key. Either way, you open the Styles and Format floating window that you’ll want to keep open as you design your document and format it. If you want, you can move it outside the editing window so it doesn’t cover any of the document.

At first, you may want to confine yourself to the styles that OpenOffice.org has set up. However, when you start adding your own styles, you will probably want to follow OpenOffice.org’s example and name your styles for their function in the document, rather than “red default text” or “small text.” Following this habit will mean that you don’t need to rename styles as their formatting changes.

At the top left of the floating window are icons for displaying the different types of styles available in the program. Writer is especially rich in styles, with no less than five types, but all the OpenOffice.org programs have at least a couple of types

By default, OpenOffice.org shows all the available styles for a type — and, especially in Writer, that can be an overwhelming lot of them. Fortunately, you can make your life saner by changing the view at the bottom of the Styles and Format floating window. You can change the view to a particular category of related styles, or choose Custom Styles to see only the ones that you have added, or Applied Styles to see only the ones that you are using in the document.

If you select the Hierarchical view, you will see that some styles depend on others. For instance, the Heading 1, 2, and 3 styles, as well as the Title and Subtitle styles, are dependent upon the Heading style. That means that, if you suddenly decide to change the font used for headings in your document, you change the font in the Heading style, and change the font in all these other styles at the same time.

To modify a style, or to create a new style based on an existing one, right-click on a style in the floating window and make a selection from the context menu. If you want to create a style not based on any other style in particular, click the Default style, which is at the top of the hierarchy of styles.

In the top right of the floating window are two other tools. One is Fill Format Mode, which allows you to select a style, then apply it like a paint brush to your document. The other is New Style from Selection, which allows you to select an already-formatted part of your document as the basis for a new style. You don’t need to use either of these tools, but they can be handy if they fit your style of working.

WRITER  STYLES

OpenOffice.org’s word processor has five different types of styles: paragraphs, characters, pages, frames, and lists. The dialog window for each type of style includes an organizer style, where you can edit the name of a style, the style it is based on (if only Default), and, in some cases, the next style that is used. Setting the Next Style can be a useful way to automate, so that a Heading 1 style is followed by a Textbody style, or a Right Page style is followed by a Left Page with no intervention on your part.

The most basic type of Writer style is paragraph styles, which apply to all the text between two places where you press the Enter key. When you edit a paragraph style, you can edit the typeface and its weight, the line alignment, how it is hyphenated, and other basic features. If you want to be more elaborate, you can give the paragraph a border or a colored background as well, or create drop capitals for its start or assign a list style.

Paragraph styles include several features on the Indent and Spacing tab that mean you can keep your hands on the keyboard and not have to worry about adding formatting. By setting the spacing above and below the paragraph, you can add spacing between paragraphs automatically. Similarly, if you set a First Line indent then make it automatic, you can almost entirely ignore the Tab tab in the style dialog window and the Tab key on your keyboard.

After paragraph styles, character styles are the most commonly used. As their name suggests, character styles are used to edit blocks of text that are smaller than paragraphs, such as the titles of books or the numbers for foot notes in the text. Since they replace the formatting of the paragraphs in which they are used, character styles contain many of the same basic settings as paragraph styles, especially the ones to do with fonts and font effects. They contain nothing flashy, and in many ways are the workhorses of Writer’s styles.

By contrast, page styles are often overlooked, but are worth a closer look because they give Writer many of its desktop publishing capabilities. If you want multiple headers and footers, you need to design separate page styles for each design. Page styles are also the easiest way to automate page numbering, or set the number of columns used. If you are writing academic papers, page styles also allow you to fine-tune the look of footnotes.

Frame styles are another feature largely used in desktop publishing. You can use frame styles to format the position, look, and size of objects like pictures that you add to a document. Many of the most important features in frame styles are on the Wrap tab, where you can set how text is positioned around the frame, and the distance that separates the text from the frame.

List styles are really a sub-category of paragraph styles, but are in a separate category because they contain a lot of small options. You can either select a numbering or bullet style from the default options, or create your own using the Position and Option tabs, specifying such details as the spacing between a number or a bullet and the text that comes after, or the characters that come first; for example, you could set up a list style so that each number was preceded by the word “Step,” was followed by five spaces before the text begins, and was formatted in the Default character style. When you are finished, you can then assign a style to a paragraph style, using the same list style in different paragraph styles to save yourself the effort of defining it twice. The default list styles, you’ll find, are divided by names: Numbering styles are for numbered lists, and List styles for bulleted lists.

STYLES IN CALC

Spreadsheets do not lend themselves to styles as well as text documents, but Calc uses two styles to make your life easier: Cell and page styles.

Cell styles are used for storing formatting for individual spreadsheet styles. They include general choices such as the font used, as well as more spreadsheet-oriented choices, such as the number format, which determines how a cell treats any numbers entered into it.

If you prefer that everything in a cell is visible at all times, you might want to set features on the Alignment tab of the Default tab. By selecting Wrap text automatically and Hyphenation option, you can ensure that cell contents is always readable, even when you do not have the cell selected. Alternatively, you can shrink the cell contents so that it fits the available space.

You will probably want to use cell styles regularly, but page styles are likely to interest you only if you plan on printing a spreadsheet — a task that is often a difficult process of time and error. The problem is not so much the choice of the font, the margin or the background color (all of which you can set in a page style) as how to translate the unlimited size of a spreadsheet on to the confines of a page. For this reason, the most important tab in the page style dialog is the Sheet tab, where you can set what is printed, and exactly how columns and rows are transferred to the printed page. Page styles will not always remove all of the trial and error, but they can make the process of printing much easier.

IMPRESS AND DRAW STYLES

OpenOffice.org’s presentation and graphics program use much of the same code. Unsurprisingly, then, their Style and Format floating windows show the same styles, graphic text and presentation styles, even though presentation styles are grayed out in Draw.

Presentation styles are Impress’s version of Writer’s paragraph and list styles. You can use them to adjust the titles and bullet points that you add to a presentation. They include many of the same features as paragraph styles, laid out in the same tabs, such as Fonts, Font Effects, and Indents and Spacing. Other tabs, such as Alignment, are simplified versions of their paragraph style equivalents, because Impress is less flexible about arranging text than Writer. You can also set Tabs if you like, although creating a table is probably a better option for complex positioning of text.

Other choices for presentation styles resemble those for list styles. You can choose a numbering style from the Numbering type tab, or a graphical bullet from the Graphical tab. Or, if you prefer, you can use the Customize tab to set all the details of your lists yourself.

In contrast to presentation styles, graphic styles adjust the features of objects created in Draw or with the Drawing tool bar in Impress. These objects include simple geometric shapes as well as stars, flow chart symbols, and — rather confusingly, text that is treated as a graphic rather than ordinary text. With graphic styles, you can set such features as the line and fill for objects, or quickly give them a shadow or make them partly transparent. If text is involved with the object, you can also add much as the same formatting as you can with paragraph or presentation styles. Graphic styles are especially useful when you are creating many objects of the same type, such as the rectangles around names and titles in an organizational chart.

STARTING TO USE STYLES

This is only a quick introduction to the different types of styles in OpenOffice.org and how you can use them. A detailed description would require considerable space, and possibly create anxiety option. In general, you should start using styles lightly, at first using only those features that make immediate sense to you, and branching out into the more advanced settings gradually. Most of OpenOffice.org’s default style settings are reasonable ones for most purposes, so you can usually trust them until you are ready to control more of the details yourself.

Even so, you may find the initial job of creating styles takes some time and requires you to do some planning before you plunge into writing. You may need some time to get used to these changes, but you should find that, by separating the design process from the actual writing, using styles allows you to focus more on content when you do start to write.

Still, why repeat the process of design unless you absolutely have to? Create a Default template that contains most of your favorite settings, then add additional ones as you remember other types of documents that you use regularly. You might, for example, add a template for essays if you are a student, or for memos if you work in an office. By saving all your style-oriented documents as templates, you will save even more time, and remove much of the repetition from your work.

That, really, is the whole point. By helping you to get organized and think about what you are doing, styles can save you hours of what is essentially drudgery and leave you free to focus on what you are saying — and not on how it looks.

By Bruce Byfield

For your personal use only

Your free fillable Valentine’s correspondence set is here and ready for you to use immediately: a card, envelope round label (WL-350) seal and a wrap-around envelope label (WL-7000).

Specs: These Valentine cards and  labels in PDF are cross-platform and application independent. They will work on Mac OSX, Linux, Windows, Solaris and other operating systems. There can be compatibility issues among different PDF Readers. For optimum performance and full use of all functions, we recommend you download for free Adobe PDF Reader version 9.

Fonts: If you want to change the font type, size or color, (as well as bold, italics, etc.) select Control +E if you’re using a PC or Apple + E on a Mac. A toolbar will appear giving you additional text

Each type available in Autofill: Insert your text and hit tab, the template will automatically populate. Also add different information. The following links lead to .zip files, which you can download and unpack on your hard drive:

DOWNLOAD THE AUTOFILL

DOWNLOAD THE ORIGINALS

About the designer:

Green Originals Design is a multi-discipline design studio of surface and lifestyle designer, Kathy Green. Inspired by nature and its abundance of beautifully juxtaposed color combinations, Kathy has infused her love of color into all of her creations. Her work has a fun, chic and elegant modern style.

From labels and tags to paper and packaging, her unique creations are innovative in the rapidly-growing “printables” trend. Green Originals provides customers with the designs and the templates to create beautiful items using their home printer.

Along with custom design work, all designs are available for licensing on paper products, gift wrap, stationery and scrapbooking products as well as for product development in the areas of fashion, textiles, children’s and home décor.

Visit Worldlabel.com for all your labels

Joan Vieweger, Co-Founder of Choclatique…chocolates out of the box!, provided us with some beautiful images to show how she uses Worldlabel labels for her merchandise. After you take a look at this packaging, you might remember that Valentine’s Day is just SIX DAYS away! Before you get caught short, you might visit Choclatique. They were Voted “Most Gifted Chocolatier” by the International Chocolate Salon last year!

Joan uses gold labels to identify product types, varieties and weights, as you can see above in the nut front and side view of the assortment box. A close-up of the nutrition information on the assortment box is shown below:

Choclatique uses white labels as shown above to apply nutritional information and for bulk pack product identification. As you can see from the image below, Joan uses a wide variety of sizes in both the gold and white labels to supply the information she needs to apply to all her food packagings:

Joan states, “Due to the number of sku’s we have in our line, the flexibility of your labels is great. We can easily:

• Replenish supply when needed on the assortment labels and include a production date for each different production run
• Make changes on the fly to our nutritional labels when there are ingredient changes from suppliers
• Create new sizes of offerings when needed from 1# ballotins to 8-oz. bags to 3-oz. samples

“We also use the labels to help organize the bulk pack product inventory and for creating easy-to-read labels for use at trade shows.”

Thanks, Joan, for a wonderful recommendation, especially from such a wonderful company. Choclatique is a privately owned, super-premium chocolate company founded in 2003 by Ed Engoron and Joan Vieweger. Hand-crafted in their Southern California Chocolate Studios by professional artists and chocolatiers, Choclatique provides over 200 *Authentically American premium chocolate confections, from traditional to whimsical, to secretly savor or share with those you love. Choclatique assortments are available high-end boutiques, 5-star hotels and clubs and online at www.choclatique.com. Be sure to visit the blog, too, at http://www.choclatique.com/blog/!

*Choclatique’s procurement policy is to buy sustainable, American-made and sourced products. All of their confections are made in their Southern California Chocolate Studios. They are proud to support the United States economy.

Clip Art of the Month for February 2010 will focus on Content regulation.

Whether one stands in favor of Apple’s products or against them, it’s impossible to deny Jobs and Company’s impact on our technological lives. Last week saw the unveiling of what Apple believes will become a “third category” of mobile computing: the iPad. The iPad aims at simplifying the user’s computing experience by merging elements of Apple’s existing laptop and phone releases.

In the new millennium, computing platforms have trended toward more open source solutions. While it may offer the end user a more simple and streamlined experience, the iPad also seems to assert Apple’s intention to focus on technology as a controlled gateway for proprietary consumption.

Images by Frector, adam_lowe, Minduka, flomar, and Tranberry (all above) demonstrate Apple’s influence on modern design and why it cannot be ignored. The reception of their latest product has been decidedly mixed. How will the introduction of the iPad affect the Open Clip Art Community? What ramifications might this have as open source computing progresses? Time will tell. In the meantime, feel free to share your thoughts and continue supporting Open Clip Art Library by using and contributing vector artwork.

Clip Art of the month is sponsored by Worldlabel.com, a multifunctional label manufacturer.

Cloud computing is all the rage these days. But while the idea of using your browser to access your applications and documents sounds like a great idea on paper, in practice there are all kinds of reasons to stick to your desktop software. Take OpenOffice.org, for example. None of the available Web-based word processors can compete with Writer when it comes to features and flexibility. But even if you don’t subscribe to the idea of ditching OpenOffice.org in favor of a Web-based productivity suite like Google Docs or Zoho Docs, you can still put some useful Web-based services to some practical use.

One of the key issues when working with documents on your machine is to keep them safe and accessible from any machine. That’s why services like Dropbox are becoming increasingly popular: using them, you can store your documents off-site and access them from any machine. Another solution is to use the SMEStorage service which provides access to a variety of back-end storage solutions such as Amazon S3, Box.net, and even your own FTP server. The beauty of this approach is that it provides a transparent connection to one or several services of your choice and adds a few clever features of its own. The best part, however, is that the service provides the MultiCloud File Manager extension for OpenOffice.org, which you can use to save and access documents stored in the cloud directly from within the productivity suite.

SMEStorage offers a number of free packages, so you can take the service for a spin without paying a dime. For example, you can get the SMEStorage S3 package based on the Amazon S3 service which includes 250MB storage space, which is plenty for storing OpenOffice.org documents. Before you download and install the MultiCloud File Manager extension, you can select the package you like and create an account with SMEStorage. Once you’ve done that grab the latest version of the MultiCloud File Manager extension. Launch OpenOffice.org, choose Tools -> Extension Manager, press the Add button, select the downloaded .oxt file and press Open.

Restart OpenOffice.org, and you should see the SMEStorage toolbar containing two buttons: Open and Save. To save the currently opened OpenOffice.org document on SMEStorage, click on the Save button, provide your user name and password and make sure that the http://www.smetube.com/smestorage/api path is selected in the API Host drop-down list. Press Login to open the file manager. Select then the destination (or create a new one) and press Save. You’ll then be prompted to encrypt the document by specifying a password. You can skip this step by pressing the Do not encrypt button.

If you plan to store a large number of documents and you want to be able to quickly locate them, you should provide a short description and assign tags to the document before you hit Save. You can then use the MultiCloud file manager’s filtering feature to quickly locate the documents you want. For example, if you want to find documents containing the article tag, click on the Filter icon, select Files from the Filter On drop-down list, select String in the name or tag from Filter Type, enter the tag in the Filter Data field, and press the Set Filter button. To disable the filter, use the No Filter button.

SMEStorage also offers a Web-based interface that lets you manage and share stored documents and do other clever things with your stuff.

By Dmitri Popov

OpenOffice.org is an excellent all-around productivity suite as it is, but you can add a few useful features using extensions to make it better suited for use in a business environment. Here are a handful of extensions worth considering if you are using OpenOffice.org as a business tool.

OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs

Right from the start, Google Docs has been a useful complement to OpenOffice.org. Since this web-based office suite supports the OpenDocument format, you can send documents back and forth between OpenOffice.org and Google Docs. While this works fine when you have to upload or download documents every now and then, transferring dozens of documents between OpenOffice.org and Google Docs can quickly become a nuisance. The OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs (ooo2gd) extension solves the problem by allowing you to easily upload OpenOffice.org documents to Google Docs as well as open existing Docs files in Writer. The upload feature supports not only ODT documents, but also SXW, DOC, and RTF. Moreover, ooo2gd can send spreadsheets in ODS, XLS, and CVS formats as well as PPT and PPS presentations. The download part of the ooo2gd extension is still in the experimental stage, and for now, you can only open Google Docs documents in Writer as plain text files.

Sun Report Builder

While OpenOffice.org Base is a rather powerful database application, its default reporting capabilities are not up to scratch. To beef them up, you need the Sun Report Builder (SRB) extension. It not only adds a few advanced features, but also makes the process of creating a report more straightforward. Since SRB acts a lot like Base’s Form Designer, creating a report is as easy as drawing fields and specifying their properties in the Properties window. SRB also offers easy-to-use sorting and grouping capabilities, so you can group and sort the data in the report by specified criteria. Besides simple text fields, SRB supports calculation fields called functions that you can use for manipulating data in the existing fields.

DataForm

Let’s face it, tabbing through cells in a Calc spreadsheet is not the most efficient way to populate them with data. The DataForm extension provides a faster, and more intuitive way to enter data into cells, and sports a couple of other useful features to boot.

MySQL Connector

While OpenOffice.org has always sported the ability to talk to MySQL databases, connecting the productivity suite to the popular database engine wasn’t particularly straightforward. Establishing a connection to MySQL involved installing and configuring a connector software, which did require some skills and made the whole idea less attractive. Fortunately, the MySQL Connector extension integrates support for MySQL databases right into OpenOffice.org Base. Once installed, the extension adds the Connect native option to the database connection wizard which allows you to specify connection settings.

Sun PDF Import

If you are dealing with PDF documents on a daily basis, you’ll appreciate the Sun PDF Import extension. Once installed, you can open and edit PDF documents in OpenOffice.org. While the extension won’t replace a dedicated PDF editor, it can come in handy when you need to quickly edit or comment a PDF document.

BY DMITRI POPOV

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