Extra! Extra!

Before we move away from the classic office applications, I would like to take another moment to address the issue of templates. Although StarOffice, the non-free commercial sibling of OpenOffice.org, comes with a number of templates for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation graphics, OpenOffice.org is still quite light in this area. As I mentioned earlier, the Impress package has no included templates at all.

To resolve this issue, the OO Extras Web site was born.

Travis Bauer has put together a great site with a number of community created and distributed templates for the OpenOffice.org suite. The site is laid out so that you can look for things specific to your application of choice, and screenshots are provided so that you can get a preview of what the document will look like. Because OO Extras has become an international affair, these extras come in different languages, as well.

A visit to OO Extras is well worth your time. Perhaps in time, you too will contribute to this growing body of work.