Plan-B for Software Documentation

According to Susan Lister, OpenOffice.org is a good tool to convert your Powerpoint presentations into good looking web pages.

Susan is dissatisfied with “clunky ‘powerpoint to webpage’ slideshows”, produced by MS Powerpoint. so she looked for a better solution and found it in OpenOffice.org Impress. She discovered:

These experiments showed that I can make a better web page set up using Open Office - my final website was a smaller file size as well as smaller in the amount of screen real estate. I liked the fact that html wizard gave me control over whether I wanted frames, show notes included and a title screen as well the size of the final presentation (640×480, 800×600, 1024×768).

Susan discovered, that the HTML web pages created by Impress not only look better but are also smaller by a factor of 10.

Reading the Technology Enhanced Learning blog, today I discovered an open source web conferencing application, called WebHuddle.

To my delight WebHuddle does offer support for OpenOffice.org Impress files to share with the audience.

What type of content may I upload for my meeting?

You may upload any combination of Microsoft Powerpoint files, Open Office Impress files, individual GIF or JPEG images, and ZIP files containing GIF or JPEG images. Note that Powerpoint animations are not visible when displayed in WebHuddle.

WebHuddle is a server centric approach to web conferencing. It server is based on Java servlet technology. The client is a small Java applet of less than 175k. It provides the basic features of sharing presentations, the desktop, files, and interacting with questions to the presenter and questionnaires. Optionally it can add a Voice over IP audio channel. In addition the whole session can be recorded and played back virtually identical.

Plan-B for OpenOffice.org celebrates fast expansion of its help topics supported by screencasts.

Within two weeks, we were able to grow the number of screencasts by 50%. Most new screencasts deal with paragraph formatting.

Some of the new additions are:

• Define space above paragraphs
• Define space below paragraphs
• Keep lines together in a paragraph or keep paragraphs together on the same page
• Also control orphan paragraphs and widow paragraphs on a page

If you like fancy document formatting then you need to check out how to create drop cap letters at the beginning of a paragraph.

We look forward to your comments on the new help topics.

I can’t believe what I just found on the Yahoo!Search Blog about removing pages from a website. The author says “The best way to remove dead URLs from the Yahoo! Search index is to return an HTTP Error 404 when our crawler requests the page.”

Are they serious, really serious?

The HTTP spec clearly says return code 404 is “Not Found” temporarily and 410 is “Gone” permanently. They even say in th explanation for code 404 “The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.”

Yahoo slurp is free to treat a 404 page as if removed although I don’t think it serves the searching public well. However, I can’t understand why the Yahoo!Search blog teaches webmasters to send a 404 if a 410 return code is appropriate.

Just needed to rant about this, because this blog has for sure a wide readership.

Apparently, interest to use OpenOffice.org as a tool to other means is growing. I just discovered that OpenMRS, an open source Medical Record System framework, plans to use OpenOffice.org as an alternative Data Entry mechanism.

More precisely, Matthew Harrison proposed this project for the Google summer of Code challenge, and apparently got accepted. Michael started blogging about his project. Currently he is reading up on OpenOffice.org macros programming and XForms, which he intends to use for formalized data entry.

Google’s summer of code pays student interns for the summer to create open source code for many open source projects. It has been quite popular with students from around the world. While the stipend of $4,500, is nice compensation for something a student might do anyhow, it is a lot of money to many students in other countries. In any case it does help many open source projects to get some additional resources which they mentor and help to achieve the project’s goal.

OpenMRS is an initiative to build a much needed medical record system framework, that is affordable for developing countries to manage their are number of patients or such diseases like AID/HIV. Impressively, the project is only one year old, but has implementations in seven countries and collected millions of patient observations.

Plan-B for OpenOffice.org has grown to 110 screencasts and 157 glossary entires.

This is our Plan-B approach to documenting the popular open source office suite with screencasts (short videos) and smart search technology that helps you find what you are looking for.

If you have not checked it out, please join the other ~150 a day that visit this site teaching OpenOffice.org. If you like it come back like the growing number of repeat visitors. If you love it, register for more benefits to come.

I just stumbled upon this interesting article about the OpenOffice.org and StarOffice quality assuarance efforts. I used to be a QA Manager for 4+ years, so I sympathize with my fellow German Thorsten Ziehm. QA work is not the most creative and sexy task one can do. But it is vitally important for a successful product and it teaches you a lot.

Thanks Thorsten for the work and for the insight (and the great charts)!

It was bound to happen sooner or later, OpenOffice.org caught it’s first worm. Sophos reports the first sightings of an OOo scripting worm in the wild. It uses an OOo document to carry itself. Remarkably, the worm is cross platform and uses perl on Linux, ruby on Mac OS X and JavaScript on Windows to infect other files and distribute itself through instant messaging.

The damage? It looks like the worm does download and display a porn image.

To the delight of Sophos, the presumable author did send the file directly to Sophos address.

I would like to present today some new screencasts for OpenOffice.org Draw, the vector graphics application in the OpenOffice.org suite.

We posted some basic screencasts for OpenOffice.org Draw yesterday.

While these number of screencasts for Draw is still small, the set is already useful. Lets assume you want to create a flow chart. A novice user might create some rectangles, and draw ellipses and connect these with lines. However, this will require careful planning so you position all the boxes first and the draw the lines. If you need to move any of the shapes you also have to adjust the end points of the lines.

You are probably better off to draw shapes from the flow chart menu, which gives you all the elements that are normed for this type of drawing. Then use object connectors to build a flexible mesh of objects and their connections. These connectors stick to the connection port of the objects and do move with the objects.

Finally, you annotate your flow chart with text frames and add potential notes withcallout bubbles.

Dimitri Popov is known for his articles with deep insight. He has done it again and wrote a great introduction to how to extend OpenOffice.org with templates, macros and whole programs.

May be this idea in my head to add an item to the Help menu, that does navigate to Plan-B for OpenOffice.org became just a little more real.