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.

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.

It’s paper-writing time again, which means I’ve spent many long hours lately with OpenOffice Writer (for now, I’m still using version 2.4). Writer is a great application and a useful tool for getting work done. But there are some components that I continue to find endlessly frustrating, namely…

The Writer's Tools extension adds a useful new menu to the popular, open source office suite OpenOffice.org that bakes convenient tools like Google Translate, an online dictionary lookup tool, email backup, remote backup to an FTP server and more directly into OO.org.

Many professional translators use computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools such as SDLX, TRADOS, Déjà Vu and WordFast. But since integrate tightly with Microsoft Word, you can’t use them with OpenOffice.org Writer. The Anaphraseus extension provides solution to the problem: using it, you can turn Writer into a powerful CAT tool.

The AuthorSupportTool extension not just adds some random features to OpenOffice.org Writer, it dramatically enhances the word processor's functionality, turning it into a powerful tool for working on research papers and complex documents.

Do you fancy Web-based word processors but aren't ready to leave OpenOffice.org? You can work with your Zoho Writer and Google Docs files from the convenience of OpenOffice.org Writer, courtesy of the OoGdocsIntegrator extension.

OpenOffice.org Writer is as much a desktop publishing program as a word processor.

This piece of software is a very powerful suite of writer's tools that is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows and has a HUGE feature set perfect for making your writing task much easier. In this article we will be discussing the Linux version of the software.