Free tutorials for Open Office

With funding from the U.S. Department of Education Inpics has placed several visual tutorials online for popular client software. The idea is that ads on the pages will keep them online.

Most are for proprietary programs like Microsoft Office and Dreamweaver, programs with their own extensive help systems and abundant publisher support.

But there are also simple tutorials here for major features of Open Office, including Writer, Calc, the Base database tool and Impress, its equivalent to PowerPoint.

These tutorials are very good. Each example is given several Web pages, with each command shown and demonstrated. It's not animated, it's graphic, and it's not a complete manual.

But if you're like most people and only use 10% of a program's power anyway, this will get you there, and give you the confidence to go further with open source applications.

Someone from the government actually helped. Imagine that.