Free Soap Labels & Candle Labels Biz Starter Kit

soap

Are you starting your own small soap or candle business. Are you stumped for ideas on your labels? Worry no more! We’re offering free fillable labels in PDF label templates for U.S. letter-size label sheets. There are two starter label designs to choose from. Each design has 10 different sized labels in rectangular shapes, oval and round labels.

Continue reading

OpenOffice.org New User Orientation

Open Office

Welcome to OpenOffice.org, the world-class office suite that’s also free and open source. This is your new-user orientation. You probably already know that OpenOffice.org includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation application, drawing program, and database: you stay productive without touching your wallet. What you may not know are all the resources to help you make the most of your experience. Read on to discover support, tutorials, community insights, templates, clip art, extensions, and blogs.

OpenOffice.org is organized differently than its main competitor. Hoping to entice business users to purchase support and services, Sun Microsystems (recently purchased by Oracle) gives away not just the OpenOffice.org free of charge, but also its source code (the blueprints) and a significant degree of control. OpenOffice.org is organized as a community under the leadership of Louis Suarez-Potts, the community manager employed by Sun Microsystems. Sun funds the infrastructure and most of the software engineers. The community provides additional software engineers, quality assurance experts, marketers, translators, template developers, trainers, help desk staff, and other important roles. Anyone may participate in the community. Continue reading

Creating Labels for Canning

Canning Label

One of summer’s pleasures is its abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables. If you’re the grower, then along with the joy of eating summer’s bounty is the responsibility of making sure nothing goes to waste. Because we often harvest more than we can eat, canning is a common way to store summer foods for use later that year. After all, who doesn’t love receiving a nicely wrapped can of home-grown tomatoes or a jar of fresh strawberry jam?
Continue reading

Free Cinco de Mayo Labels and Cards printable PDF

Cinco de Mayo (Spanish for “Fifth of May”) is a regional holiday in Mexico, primarily celebrated in the state of Puebla, with some limited recognition in other parts of Mexico.The holiday commemorates the Mexican army’s unlikely defeat of French forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, under the leadership of Mexican General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín.

Continue reading

FastMailMerge: An Alternative OpenOffice.org Tool

FastMailMerge is an OpenOffice.org extension for those who feel intimidated by other alternatives. Unlike the standard OpenOffice.org merge tools or KBarCode, and allows you to see what you are doing each step of the way.

Like any other extension, you can install FastMailMerge by downloading it, then opening Tools -> Extension Manager in OpenOffice.org. The next time you start OpenOffice.org, the extension is ready to use — but note that its icon is placed on Calc’s toolbar, because, even though it outputs to Writer and other text formats, FastMailMerge uses a spreadsheet as the data source.

Continue reading

Spreading Digital Freedom with The Whuffie Factor

Tara Hunt’s book, The Whuffie Factor, gives the Free Open Source Software world a tool for thinking about how to reach out beyond the echo chamber of technologists, who already “get” how important FOSS is, to the much larger world of technophobes who, with their whuffie-factordollars and keyboards, will decide whether FOSS will succeed on the desktop or not. We in the FOSS world are really good at writing game-changing code, but we need to get better at getting people to use the code in mainstream applications, and we need to get better at forging alliances.

Tara Hunt’s book, The Whuffie Factor can help us in both of those areas. Her book offers both principled guidelines and clear case examples for forging alliances and creating powerful, grassroots channels for reaching end users. The Whuffie Factor should become part of the discussion as to how we build community among mainstream end users.

Hunt’s premise is that social networking web 2.0 tools are leveling the marketing playing field a bit by offering small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) such as FOSS projects the opportunity to amplify their reach. That concept is not new, and Hunt didn’t invent it with her book, The Whuffie Factor (TWF). But what is unique to TWF is Hunt’s skill in identifying five core marketing principles and showing us how to implement them. The five core principles are:

  1. Turn the marketing bullhorn around and create continuous conversations with customers (end users). Stop talking and start listening.
  2. Become part of the community you serve. You can’t serve everyone, so don’t try. Identify communities with whom you can connect.
  3. Create amazing customer experiences. Design products and services people love.
  4. Embrace the chaos. Be agile. Respond to change.
  5. Find your higher purpose. Social capital only gains in value as you give it away. Figure out how to give back to the community, and do it often.

Continue reading

Clip Art of the Week: Anonymous Clip Arts

One of the solutions to our constant need for developers, is that instead of importing our old collection of clip art algorithmically, on Open Clip Art Library, librarians such as Johnny Automatic, Chovynz, Darth Gimp and others have been helping to clean, manually upload, and tag files for the refreshed Open Clip Art Library.

For this week, I want to feature their work on uploading public domain clip arts from the old system such as these AIGA standard images like this heliport:

heliport

aiga

aiga

If your clip art is uploaded as the anonymous user on Open Clip Art Library, please do contact the Anonymous author to get the clipart added to your account on the new Open Clip Art Library engine. For this week, please do applaud all those who are helping upload old cliparts to the anonymous account to help move us towards our goal of 12,000 clip art uploads this month!

UPDATE: As pointed out, praise Papapishu who has contributed so much to these efforts!

OpenOffice.org Opens up for Business

Open Office logo

The economic situation is eating into your profits, and the Microsoft Office licenses look more expensive than before. Or maybe you are familiar with the way Microsoft Office has looked for over a decade: it had a file menu, edit menu, and format menu, and you balk at the thought of retraining your staff for Microsoft Office 2007’s bizarre ribbon. In either case, you don’t have to buy Microsoft Office thanks to OpenOffice.org: the best kept secret in office suites.

OpenOffice.org is a free office suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet, slide presentation application, drawing program, and database. It’s compatible with practically all operating systems and runs well on old and new computers alike. Don’t worry about exchanging documents with Microsoft Office users because OpenOffice.org is compatible with many file formats including the new Microsoft Office 2007 formats.
Continue reading