One of the perqs of being a journalist is that I often hear about software and events before most people. A case in point is Writer's Tools, an extension for OpenOffice.org Writer being developed by my fellow journalist Dimitri Popov, whose articles about macros have taught me most of what I know on the subject.

If you love using macros in spreadsheets, OpenOffice's macros might suit all of your needs

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 documents, look up and translate words and phrases, manage text snippets, and keep tabs on document statistics.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom that a word processor can’t help you to become a better writer, you can use OpenOffice.org Writer with the Writer's Tools extension to improve your writing skills and make the writing process more efficient.

The Writer's Tools extension adds a useful new menu to the popular, open source office suite OpenOffice.org that bakes convenient tools like Google Translate, an online dictionary lookup tool, email backup, remote backup to an FTP server and more directly into OO.org.

The AuthorSupportTool extension not just adds some random features to OpenOffice.org Writer, it dramatically enhances the word processor's functionality, turning it into a powerful tool for working on research papers and complex documents.

With OpenOffice.org Writer you can create any kind of form from simple questionnaires to sophisticated interactive tests. Here's how to create a simple quiz using the form tools, and how to add interactivity to it with a couple of macros.

Many professional translators use computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools such as SDLX, TRADOS, Déjà Vu and WordFast. But since integrate tightly with Microsoft Word, you can’t use them with OpenOffice.org Writer. The Anaphraseus extension provides solution to the problem: using it, you can turn Writer into a powerful CAT tool.

Is it possible to set up chapters or sections in an OpenOffice Writer document so that I can jump to them easily, like maybe with tabs or a tree like some PDFs have? I found something called "sections" in the documentation, but it doesn't sound like what I'm looking for...Definitely