Using OpenOffice for fun and profit
OpenOffice has come a long way in recent times and it is therefore surprising that a number of folk don’t use some of OpenOffice’s basic features (styles, outline numbering, captioning, restarting page numbering, headings, auto-generating an Illustration Index etc) and instead choose manually format their documents. I’ve found such features to significantly reduce documentation time and allow for quick formatting changes across large documents (think test plans or manuals with several hundred pages which can be expected for non-trivial software).
Anybody who uses OpenOffice should read up on these features. I’d recommend reading the document, Writing a Thesis , as it provides a good starter’s guide to learning and implementing these features.