OpenOffice.org's tools for creating diagrams are easy to ignore. For one thing, their controls are extremely small. For another, they are pitifully under-documented in the online help, which plods through the options without explaining what they are or why you want to use them.

" In OpenOffice 2.0 Reports, it's easy to do the simple stuff, like just printing the contents of a table or query. It requires no SQL know-how at all, just the ability to press F4 and click and drag. Creating interesting and more informative reports isn't hard; but you must be willing to step away from the wizard."

Apparently, the only thing that stopped developers from creating useful OpenOffice.org extensions was the lack of a place to publish them. With the launch of the OpenOffice.org Extension Repository, the number of extensions listed there has shot up, and there are no signs of a slowdown. Although quantity doesn't always mean quality, the repository already offers a few nifty extensions that can expand the functionality of OpenOffice.org and make your work more efficient.

A conversion calculator can save you a lot of time and unnecessary mouse clicks when you need to convert values in a document from the imperial to the metric system (or vice versa). Although OpenOffice.org doesn't have a built-in calculator, you can easily create your own one using OpenOffice.org Basic.

We often talk about how useful the productivity suite OpenOffice.org is for anyone who needs word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet software, but doesn't want to plunk down a bunch of money to get it. While you may have heard of OpenOffice.org, there are some lesser-known forks and some handy tools that you might not know about. Let's take a look.

Let's face it, databases are only minimally human-readable. In fact, to anybody who's not an accountant or a computer geek, reading databases can be downright intimidating. However, this limitation is partially compensated by the fact that reports in Base are quick and easy to create and are displayed and printed in Writer.

The Sun Report Builder extension adds powerful reporting capabilities to OpenOffice.org Base, and using it to create reports is easy, as we can see with a simple example.

So you've written a nifty OpenOffice.org macro and want to share it with the world. You can, of course, publish the code on your Web site, but a better way to go is to pack it as an easy-to-install OpenOffice.org extension.

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.