25. April 2007

Wikipedia Releases Offline CD

While this news is not directly related to OpenOffice.org, it does deserve a special mention:

"The Wikimedia Foundation and Linterweb announces the release of Wikipedia Version 0.5, a compact disc collection of around 2,000 articles from the English Wikipedia. The project paves the way for many such collections, with larger releases planned in a variety of languages."

The Wikipedia CD is available for purchase, and it can be downloaded via FTP or bittorrent free of charge. Source: wikipdiaondvd.com, Slashdot.

Get Microsoft Office 2007 Fonts legally and free

If you fancy the fonts that ship with Office 2007 and Vista (Calibri is particularly nice), you can get them legally for free by downloading and installing the PowerPoint Viewer 2007. In fact, you don't even have to install the viewer in order to get the fonts. Using the 7-zip tool, you can open the installer as a regular zip file and extract the fonts (the .TTF files) from the ppviewer.cab file. Source: Praegnanz.de

22. April 2007

Pentaho Adds Reporting Solution to OpenOffice.org

"Pentaho Corp., creator of the world's most popular open source business intelligence (BI) suite , in cooperation with Sun Microsystems, today announced plans to integrate Pentaho's reporting engine into future releases of the OpenOffice.org suite. The enhancement, planned to be available with OpenOffice.org 2.3, will equip OpenOffice.org users with key desktop applications, reporting and database connectivity in a single platform." Source: Pentaho

Russians crack OpenOffice security

"OpenOffice users who've locked their files and forgotten the password - or who have a document but not the password for it - can now crack their way in, thanks to a toolkit from a Russian developer specialising in password recovery." Source: The Register

The OpenOffice Password Recovery utility is available on the Intelore's website.

10. April 2007

Spicing up OpenOffice.org's interface

If you find the default appearance of OpenOffice.org a bit too plain for your liking, you might want to try an alternative icon set from the latest OpenOffice.org build in the openSUSE Factory. Download the images_tango.zip package, rename it to images.zip, and copy it into the config folder inside your OpenOffice.org installation (C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 2.2\share\config on Windows, /usr/lib/openoffice/share/config on Linux). Since the new images.zip package replaces the existing one, you might want to backup the original one before you replace it.