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Feb. 3, 2010

Now you can easily add new and very useful features to Open Office.org using some easy-to-install extensions to make the suite ready for use in a corporate setting.

These extensions are worth considering if you are using Open Office as a mission-critical business tool. OpenOffice.org has grown considerably in the last year, and is rapidly gaining momentum as more and more business people migrate from Microsoft's Office suite to OpenOffice.org.

Additionally, Google Docs has also been a useful complement to OpenOffice. Since this Internet-based office suite supports the OpenDocument format, you can e-mail documents back and forth between OpenOffice.org and Google Docs.

While this is all sweet and dandy when you have to upload or download documents during the course of your daily workday, transferring dozens of documents between OpenOffice.org and Google Docs can quickly become a nuisance.

The OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs extension solves this small but sometimes nasty issue by allowing you to easily upload OpenOffice.org documents to Google Docs as well as open existing Docs files in Writer.

The upload feature supports not only ODT documents, but also SXW, DOC and even RTF.

What's more, ooo2gd can send spreadsheets in ODS, XLS and CVS formats as well as PPT and PPS presentations. The download part of the ooo2gd extension is still in the experimental stage, and for now, you can only open Google Docs documents in Writer as plain text files, however.

While OpenOffice.org Base is a rather powerful database application, its default reporting capabilities are still not up to par for some real busy corporate executives that demand more in a database package. To improve this, all you need is the Sun Report Builder (SRB) extension. It not only adds a few advanced features, but also makes the process of creating a report more straightforward.

Since Sun Report Builder acts a lot like Base’s Form Designer, creating a report is as easy as drawing fields and specifying their properties in the Properties window. SRB also offers easy-to-use sorting and grouping capabilities as well, so you can group and sort the data in the report by specified criteria.

Besides simple text fields, SRB supports calculation fields called functions that you can use for manipulating data in the existing fields.

Like most people today, if you're still dealing with PDF documents on a daily routine, you’ll appreciate the Sun PDF Import extension. Once installed, you can open and edit PDF documents in OpenOffice.org.

While the extension certainly won’t replace a professional PDF editor anytime soon, it can sure come in handy when you need to quickly edit or comment a PDF document.

Now, like me, if ever you had to do this in the past, tabbing through cells in a Calc spreadsheet isn't the most efficient method of populating cells with your precious data! Instead, the DataForm extension provides a faster and more intuitive way to enter data into spreadsheet cells and even features a couple of other useful cool things as well.

While Open Office has always featured the ability to talk to MySQL databases, connecting the productivity suite to the popular database engine wasn’t particularly straightforward, even in the best of times. Establishing a connection to MySQL involved installing and configuring a connector software, which did require some experience in database management software and certainly made the whole idea a lot less attractive.

Fortunately, the MySQL Connector extension integrates support for MySQL databases right into OpenOffice.org Base.

Once installed, the extension adds the Connect native option to the database connection wizard which allows you to specify connection settings.

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Source: OpenOffice.org.

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