Last week I wrote about the Open Office 3.0 note feature. If you have students submit papers electronically - OpenOffice 3.0 is a big improvement - because you can type notes and comments that appear in colored bubbles in the margins.
The problem is that in OpenOffice 3.0 these comment bubbles appear outside the printable margin. You cannot print a copy of the paper with your comments in the format that you see on the screen. In MS Office, you can.
Students can view the comments in the neat format on their computers - so it’s not a complete loss. But if you or your students ever wanted to print the paper out in the neat format (from OpenOffice) - there is no option to do that.
I figured out a simple way around this.
In Windows, Mac, and even Ubuntu(Linux) you simply need to download the MS Word Viewer. Open the file that you edit in OpenOffice in MS Word Viewer and you’ll get a file with the comments displayed in pretty bubbles that are inside the printable margin.
To do this in Ubuntu you’ll need to install the MS Word Viewer in Wine. It’s easy.
Ubuntu Users
- Install Wine (if you haven’t already)
If you are using Ubuntu, you can now install Wine by
clicking this link. Alternatively, you can install by going to
Applications->Add/Remove and searching for Wine. - Download the MS Word Viewer file for Windows.
- Right-click on the execute file
- Select “Open with Wine Windows Program Manager”
The Application should install. Now when you type comments in OpenOffice. You can re-open the saved file in you MS Word Viewer and the comments appear in the margins. You can print the paper, and the comments show up in the margins.
One Comment
You can print a screenshot. This gives output that looks identical to the screen. I prefer OOo way of showing deletions and changes to that in Word, so for me this is preferable. However, it is a bit of a hassle to have to do this for each page. An option to print markup as is Word would be preferable.
I run Wordview.exe in Win4LinPro which is a WinXP (etc) emulator which is very easy to use. So I use this for printing markup as well. It is very easy to use.