A list of macros that add functionality to OpenOffice.org.

Go-oo [Windows / Linux / Mac] is an office suite which compared with up-stream OO.o, it has better Microsoft binary file support (with eg. fields support), and it will import WordPerfect graphics beautifully. If you are reliant on Excel VBA macros - then Go-oo offers the best macro fidelity too.

With the final release two months away and an alpha version available, it's time to look at OpenOffice.org 3.1's new features: eye candy, better charts, replying to notes in the margin, overlining, macros in Base, RTL improvements for Arabic and Hebrew, and (believe it or not) better sorting. Download and report any bugs you find.

In a recent blog, Sun developer Malte Timmermann took a position on the security concerns of the Ecole Superieure d'Informatique, Electronique, Automatique (ESIEA) in Paris-Laval, France. The subject was the vulnerability of OpenOffice, involving document macros, for example.

All your friends and business partners run Microsoft Office and you cannot afford to have any blunders when reading their documents. Likewise, you don't want to have your presentations all garbled up when you import them from Impress to PowerPoint. What about Office 2007? What about macros in your Excel sheets?

One of the perqs of being a journalist is that I often hear about software and events before most people. A case in point is Writer's Tools, an extension for OpenOffice.org Writer being developed by my fellow journalist Dimitri Popov, whose articles about macros have taught me most of what I know on the subject.

With OpenOffice.org Writer you can create any kind of form from simple questionnaires to sophisticated interactive tests. Here's how to create a simple quiz using the form tools, and how to add interactivity to it with a couple of macros.

"The code that implements Arc illustrates many useful programming techniques. Some of the techniques occur multiple times, and can be considered idioms of Arc programming; techniques that can be applied to many problems. This article describes some of the most common idioms, and how they can be used in Arc programming.

Spreadsheets might be called databases for the timid, since they're more user-friendly than databases and do a good job working with limited amounts of data. Some tools for databases can work well with spreadsheets too. Take for instance DataForm, a new OpenOffice.org Calc extension that provides a form-like interface designed to make entering and finding spreadsheet data easier.