"For years now, industry restrictions and tightening profit margins have forced PC manufacturers to shy away from offering productivity software on their new PCs," stated Eugene Chang, product manager for Everex. "Our main focus was to build a no-compromise, back-to-school PC with all the software applications a typical student would require," Chang said.

"Dave Richards is an IT administrator for a city government. The city has been using OpenOffice.org for about six years. Dave's a Linux guru, and helps run an elegant, efficient Linux network with a nice big server and lots of fairly old dumb terminals running OpenOffice.org at a very acceptable speed."

OpenOffice.org suffers from a wildly inconsistent user interface (UI) that combines unique elements with borrowings from Microsoft Office. Now, in the upcoming version 2.3, it is finally having some of the cosmetic procedures it so badly needs -- at least in the charts subsystem.

"Going head to head with Microsoft 2007, the latest version of the free-for-all OpenOffice.org touts across-the-board improvements in the software's word processing, spreadsheet, database and presentation applications."

"Do you offer a program like Microsoft Publisher?" Some version of this question appears regularly on the OpenOffice.org mailing lists. Many people automatic answer "no," and say that Scribus is more suitable for desktop publishing. But, in fact, OpenOffice.org boasts two mid-level layout programs -- Draw and Writer -- each of which is far more versatile than its name suggests.

I've been talking about using the Navigator in Writer. Here are a few ways to use the Navigator in OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheets.