BluePad: Controls Presentation from Your Phone

Recently I had todo a lot of presentations which made me thinking into getting presentation pen, but since my E71 includes a pre-installed Wireless Presenter (WiPresenter), I’ve buried that thought, who needs an expensive presentation pen when a phone can perform equally when?

Bluepad remote control

But as WiPresenter is only compatible with Microsoft Windows operating system, I’m forced to use keyboard or mouse-clicks to control my presentations when I’m using Ubuntu Linux operating system. This is a drawback as I could perform the task easily thru my phone when I’m on Windows XP.

EnterBluepad, an application which enables your mobile phone to act as a Bluetooth controller. Bluepad consists of two applications, a server and a client. The server application sits on your operating system, monitoring for incoming Bluetooth connection. The client application requires a JavaME compatible mobile phone with JSR-82 (Bluetooth) feature.

The installation is straightforward for both client and server side application, the only thing to remember is to activate bluetooth on mobile phone before starting the client application. After that, you can start OpenOffice Impress and use the the phone to remotely control the presentation.

How to Generate Barcode in OpenOffice.org

I found this extension as I was searching for a great application to generate EAN-13 compatible barcode. This OpenOffice.org extension allows you to generate 5 different types of barcode generally found in the market, such as :

  • UPC-A (the most common barcode in the US)
  • EAN-13 (the most common barcode in Europe)
  • JAN (the barcode used in Japan, basically EAN-13 with the country code for Japan)
  • ISBN-13 (the barcode used in books after 2007, basically EAN-13 with a superscript)
  • ISBN-10 (the barcode used in books before 2007, basically EAN-13 with a different superscript)

Here’s how to install the extension :

  • First go to OpenOffice.org extensions website, then search for the barcode extension
  • Download the extension – barcode.oxt
  • Then start OpenOffice.org, go to Tools and select Extension Manager
  • When a dialog appears, click on Add, then find and select barcode.oxt, the extension will be installed on your OpenOffice.o
  • rg

  • To test the extension, start OpenOffice.org Draw, go to Insert, and selects Barcode, you can choose any of the barcode type to generate inside OpenOffice.org, type in the barcode value and it will be displayed on the page, with no extra effort!

Openoffice

Openoffice

Openoffice

OpenOffice- Howto Print Multiple Slides (Handout) in One page

There are times when you want to print multiple presentation slides in one page, especially when you are making handouts to give away to your audiences. Here’s how you can do that easily using OpenOffice.org Impress.

First click at the “Handouts” tab.

Printing Multiple slides on a single page in OpenOffice.org

Then you will see the slides arranged on a single page. Typical number of slides is usually between 4-6 on a single page. You can select layouts option to determined the number of slides.

OpenOffice Handouts

Alternatively, you can change the page layout to to Landspace to give it a “wider” feeling to your handouts. Just right click and select Page Layout.

OpenOffice Handouts

OpenOffice Handouts

Finally you can print your handouts by selecting File->Print, and clicking Options at the bottom of the Print Dialog. Select Handouts, and print the documents as usual.

How to print OpenOffice Handouts Slides

That’s all, hope it will help you in your daily works.

Upcoming OpenOffice.org 3.0 supports Microsoft OpenXML (docx) out of the box

The popular Free and Open Source Office application, OpenOffice.org is going to have OpenXML (*.docx, *.xlsx, *.pptx) support by default. Scheduled to be release on September 2008, OpenOffice.org 3.0 packs a lot of features you might find interesting :

openoffice 3.0 development release
  • Import PDF files support. PDF documents can be edited in Writer
  • Official Mac OS support, now includes native “Aqua” interface
  • Multiple page view in Writer
  • Error bars in OpenOffice.org charts
  • Supports OpenDocument 1.2 specification

The BETA is scheduled to be released on April 30th, 2008. For the time being, OpenOffice.org 2.x users can open Microsoft OpenXML files (*.docx, *.xlsx) using odf import filters

Thanks to Andrew Ziem for the original article, OpenOffice.org 3.0 new features, an early look