Top 25 OpenOffice Extensions You May Want To Know
OpenOffice is possibly one among the finest examples on what can be achieved in the world of Free Software. For starters, OpenOffice is an office application suite in the lines of Microsoft Office and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Now let us take a look at the list of extensions you could use in OpenOffice.
Sun PDF Import Extension
As you can infer, using this extension you could actually import and modify PDF documents. Text attributes like font family, font size, weight (bold, not bold), style (italic, not italic) are imported together with their respective text. With the help of this extension you could retain font appearance, when a PDF file uses a font not installed on your system. It can even help you in importing password-protected PDF files
English Dictionary(Based on Oxford English Dictionary)
This is one among the most sought after extensions for OpenOffice. It is basically a port of old format of OED United Kingdom english dictionary to extension format.
Professional Template Pack II - English
If you are an OpenOffice user and you are disappointed about the unavailability of good quality templates for documents and presentations, this is the extension you are looking for. This template pack consists of about 120 professional quality templates for OpenOffice.org Writer, Calc and Impress.
Pagination
A little macro that adds a 'Insert / Page number' dialog to writer. It eases the way you can add page numbers to a document. On top of that, it is compatible with large number of languages including French, Brazilian, Portuguese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian.
Obba
Obba provides a bridge from spreadsheets to Java classes. With Obba, you can easily build spreadsheet GUIs (Excel or OpenOffice) to Java code. Some of its features include loading of arbitrary jar or class files at runtime through an spreadsheet function, instantiation of Java objects, storing the object reference under a given object label, serialisation and de-serialisation and so on.
Gallery For Danger Signs
This extension add one theme to your gallery with more than 100 signs dealing with security, not as bitmap but as vector graphic in ODF format. You may modify them or retrieve some parts to build your own signs. The latest version of this extension 0.9 is released lately.
Sun Presentation Minimizer
Sun Presentation Minimizer is used to reduce the file size of the current presentation. Images will be compressed, and data that is no longer needed will be removed. The Sun Presentation Minimizer can optimize the image quality size. Presentations designed for screen or projector do not require the same high quality as presentations designed for print.
Sun Presenter Console
The Presenter Console Extension provides more control over your slide show presentation, such as the ability to see the upcoming slide, the slide notes, and a presentation timer whereas the audience see only the current slide. To avoid confusions by displaying a large number of presentation elements, the Presenter Console displays the elements on three different easily changeable views.
Sun Report Builder
Create with the Sun Report Builder stylish, smart-looking database reports. The flexible report editor can define group and page headers as well as group and page footers and even calculation fields are available to accomplish complex database reports.
OxygenOffice Extra Gallery
This Extension contains parts of OxygenOffice Project. This project creates and collects templates, galleries and other useful extras for OpenOffice.org and release them as easy-to-install Extension packages. Also you can download OxygenOffice Professional product which is a bundled Openoffice.org installer with all available extras.
OxygenOffice Extra Gallery - English Templates
Another good collection of templates. You can use this template compilation to create professional documents, tables, forms and presentation from prepared templates in no time.
Alternative dialog Find & Replace for Writer
Some of the interesting features included in this extension include fast selection preset regular and extended expressions, searched or replaced text can contain one or more paragraphs, multiple search and replacement in one step and many more.
Writer's Tools
Writer's Tools is a set of utilities designed to help OpenOffice.org users perform a wide range of tasks. Using Writer's Tools, you can back up documents, look up and translate words and phrases, manage text snippets, and keep tabs on document statistics. This is among the most downloaded extenions.
Sun Wiki Publisher
The Sun Wiki Publisher enables you to create Wiki articles on MediaWiki servers without having to know the syntax of the MediaWiki markup language. Publish your new and existing documents transparently with the Writer to a wiki page.
OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs - export & import to Google Docs, Zoho, WebDAV
Using this extension you could sync your openoffice with Google Docs, Zoho and WebDAV. You can export/import your scribbling, articles, spreadsheets, presentations et al to and from Openoffice to googledocs, zoho and webdav servers.
CADOO.o
Draw module of OpenOffice.org makes it possible to make technical drawing. CADOO.o adds some functions that one can find in other CAD. This Addon was written in python with use of the module pyuno.
Template Changer
This extension will add two new items to the File -> Templates menu that allows to assign a new template to documents. All styles and formatting will be loaded from that template and the documents will behave as it was created using that template.
Web2.0 OpenOffice.org collaboration & document management extension
The O3Spaces Workplace is a web2.0 OpenOffice.org collaboration and document management extension. The O3Spaces Workplace is available as a free to use Community Edition, offering integrated OpenOffice.org collaboration and document features for teams and workgroups.
Family Address Book
You can organize your important family dates and contact information with this database. It can produce a list of upcoming birthdays & anniversaries, print address labels, store miscellaneous family information, and export the contact information to PDA. If you are new to OpenOffice Base, this can serve as an introduction.
Compose Special Characters
Compose Special Characters lets you type two or three characters and use a keyboard shortcut to convert them into a single accented or special character. Writer and Calc are currently supported.
OpenOffice.org Base Switchboard
The Switchboard extension generates a Switchboard/Main Menu interface to access Base forms and reports. The switchboard can be grouped into categories, each of which can contain any number of menu entries. Furthermore, you can specify the size and screen location of the form to be opened.
Kaleidoscope
This is an extension for Draw. This extension draws patterns of shapes, grouped objects and bitmap pictures, rotating and scaling them, and, if possible, changing fillcolors and linecolors. You draw a few shapes or paste it from somewhere, select them with mouse and then go to Tools-->Add-ons menu in OpenOffice.org Draw.
OpenCards - A free flashcard learning extension for Impress
OpenCards is a flashcard learning extension for OpenOffice Impress. The basic idea of OpenCards is to use slide-titles as flashcard fronts and the slide contents as their backs. Based on state-of-the-art memorization and scheduling algorithms OpenCards will help you to learn any set of flashcards.
Color2Rows
This extension enabels rapid coloring tablerows with different colors to selected or used areas.
SVG Tiny Import/Export
With this extension you could import all shape types and images, elements defs/use, links, video, audio and so on. It has some issues with OpenOffice 3.1 though.
