Article for translators: Fun with OpenOffice.org: OO Extras; NewsForge article on invoicing with Calc

OO Extras is a great website to use when you need templates for just about anything from CD case labels to newsletters to invoices or even legal pleadings. In addition, there are at least 50 templates for use with OpenOffice.org Impress, the application compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint. OO Extras has language-specific files for Czech, English, French, German and Italian, as well as a few random items in other languages such as a Norwegian invoice template and a Spanish template for a European CV. The templates can be especially helpful when the setup is done in an OO.o program that you're not proficient in, but can use when someone else has done the basic work. For example, I recently created a set of marketing postcards using the “Basic Greeting Card” template for OpenOffice.org Draw, a program that I normally never use. The template has the page already quartered with placeholders for graphics and text, so it's easy to customize it even without spending a lot of time learning Draw.

NewsForge ran an interesting article by Russian linguist Dmitri Popov on “Creating an Invoicing System with OpenOffice.org Calc.” The article is extremely detailed, including screen shots, and goes step-by-step through the process of creating not only the data source and template for your invoices, but also an invoice management system to tell you if invoices have been sent, paid, or neither. The system looks easy to set up and much more dependable than retyping the client's information on every invoice and relying on your memory to tell you who paid and who didn't. Popov is also the author of Hands on Open Source a “practical introduction to some of the best open-source applications available” for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. The book is available from Lulu, the print-on-demand service profiled in Open Source Update Issue 7.