OpenDocument format offers a new approach to data storage and document exchange for office applications. But what does ODF mean for the user? What’s inside an ODF file? How portable is ODF? We examine these questions in this month’s cover story.

Microsoft has been quite successful with pushing its SharePoint technology as a means for supporting document collaboration and version control. Until now, no direct competitors have come up with a viable alternative to SharePoint, but O3Spaces is about to change that.

We’ll show you a universal system for marking changes in text documents; and along the way, you’ll get some practical experience with writing OpenOffice marcos.

The PDF format has many useful features that make it easier for readers to find their way around large documents, but the native PDF export function in OpenOffice doesn’t allow many of these elements. We’ll show you how to create better PDFs in OpenOffice with the ExtendedPDF macro.

If you need a quick and easy solution, try building your own database application in OpenOffice.org 2.0.