Since migrating to a new (different, anyway), I’ve switched completely over to OpenOffice, instead of using Microsoft Office. Nothing against MSO, really: it’s a fine product with a high learning curve and an even higher price tag. OpenOffice is open source, which has both an attractive price tag and an even more attractive philosophy behind it.

One of the things I really like about OpenOffice is that, like Firefox and many other programs I love, it is extensible. That is, you can add extensions to extend its capabilities.

Because I am doing a lot of work in Spanish right now, I downloaded the Compose Special Characters extension, which makes it incredibly easy to type accented characters. In conventional Microsoft products, you need fingers at least eight inches long to do this with any efficiency, but this extension allows you to choose how to accomplish this, making this easy to do even with short fingers.

I also downloaded the Writer2ePub extension, because I figured, hey, maybe someday I’ll want to release some ebooks. As it turns out, I’ve been working on a big long list of Spanish words and their English equivalents for the past few years, and as I was finishing it up, I realized that it would make a good ebook. So I made an ebook out of it. It took me longer than it should have, mainly because the file started out as a MSW file which got imported into OpenOffice and was never really set up correctly for publishing it as an ebook in the first place. As the extension’s author, Luca Calcinai, points out on his blog, you really need to be “thinking in EPUB” when you create a document. If I had done that from the get-go, the entire process would have ended up taking about five minutes.

Okay, here’s how the minutes really stack up:

• Time spent learning how to use this extension: 15 minutes
• Time spent dealing with a file which I had never intended to be an ebook: 60 minutes
• Time spent going back and fixing typographical errors: about four hours (until two o’clock in the morning)
• Time spent actually creating the ebook (in other words, the time it took to click twice, enter a single sentence, and watch progress bars filling up): three minutes

So yes, I am definitely going to be doing this again. You can get the ebook here, or you can just head over to my Spanish resources page to check it all out.

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