5 Must Have extensions for OpenOffice.org and its forks

OpenOffice.org undoubtedly holds out its own against paid alternatives like Microsoft Office and Apple's iWork. Whether it's the original OpenOffice.org owned by Apache, or LibreOffice owned by the Open Document Foundation or any of the forks of the original program, their functionality can be exponentially increased by the use of nifty extensions. Here are 5 of them you can't live without!

• Writer's Tools is a set of utilities designed to help OpenOffice.org users perform a wide range of tasks. Using Writer's Tools, you can back up your documents, look up and translate words and phrases, manage text snippets and much more. It is a set of many tools like Lookup for reference, Google Translate, Remote Backup, Show On Map, all of which seem to have a nice role to play in making you the ultimate writer. Muhahahaha!!!!

Illustration 1: Writer Tools in Action

• Professional Template Pack 2 installs a hell lot of Templates for yourDocuments and Spreadsheets. More than you would ever need. Who doesn't want all sort of templates for their nice looking presentations that get created in less time. Install this one now!

• OpenOffice2GoogleDocs does exactly what its name suggests, it exports your OpenOffice documents to Google Docs and vice versa. And what's more? ZohoDocs (Much better than Google Docs in my opinion) and WebDAV are also supported!

Illustration 2: More Templates, Anyone?

Illustration 3: The Toolbar

Illustration 4: The Menu, Note the Spanish!

• Alternative dialog Find & Replace for Writer (AltSearch) has a really long name but does its job quite well. It basically adds many more features to a Find & Replace operation. A few of them are multiple search and replacements in one step, searching Tables, Pictures and Text frames according to their name etc. Must have extension!

• Export As Images is a nice extension that simply lets you import all the pages of your presentations in image formats. Can be a good help for students and lecturers in colleges. Also a great help for authors who wish to distribute snippets of their work to people. The possibilities are endless! Supported formats are JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP and TIFF.

These five addons will ensure smoother working on your OpenOffice! All the tools were tried and tested on a Windows 7 system with OpenOffice 4.

Illustration 5: AltSearch is Feature Rich!