Open Office 3 is an incredible and diverse productivity tool set. It is an open source program that offers free tools for work processing, presentations, databases, and spreadsheets.
The program can be freely downloaded on PC, Mac, and Linux machines. The best part? It can open files from any other program! Read more about Open Office here and here.
If you need inspiration or want to produce a specific kind of document, never fear! Their free user-created Open Office templates are awesome, and can save you lots of time and money!
Truly, there is no reason to spend your hard earned cash on expensive software when you can get everything you need right in the Open Office suite.
If you need a word processing program, use OOO's "Write" program; if you need a PowerPoint program, use their "Presentation" software. They even have an Excel-ish program and a database program like Access.
In addition to their powerful tools, they also offer a sweet repository of Open Office templates. You can choose between Business, Education, and Personal templates. These user created templates are simple to download and simple to use.
This article will highlight some of the most useful templates available in each of the three sections.
Business
The Business section is stuffed full of excellent and resourceful templates. If you want to publish ANYTHING, you should stop here first. Open Office offers templates for every make and model of book, magazine, or document. In addition to the standard letters and reports, you can also find lots of neat extras!
Business Cards
Every person needs to have a business card. While there are lots of great places to get them made online or in your community, you can use Open Office to create your very own!
This simple template opens and is ready to be completed! It takes just seconds, and you can use the menu to customize the look to your needs.
Event Posters
To get your business recognized or to announce sales or other groovy events, you might want to use the awesome poster template!
Again, you can change the picture, the background color, the fonts, etc. Or, if you just need something quick, fill in the blanks and click print!
Time Cards
If you have employees, you need to keep track of the time and pay rates. Open Office hosts a simple template that will allow you to do both!
DVD Inserts
If you provide DVDs to your customers, you might want to include a professional looking DVD insert. This template is incredibly easy to use!
Finally, you will need to know how to charge your customers, and Invoices are a legal agreement between you and your client. The template calculates math and has spots for all of the necessary legal information.
Education
Educators will find many of the OOO templates quite handy! Instead of purchasing expensive software or trying to create a tool on your own, you can instead peruse their repository of templates.
Lesson Plan Templates
There are a few different lesson plan styles, but all of them are fantastic. They are easy to edit and modify according to your particular needs. I like this one, but, again, there are others that are just as fabulous!
Rubrics
If you use a rubric for grading or you want to try out a few different types, OOO has the right resources for you! I like to provide a hard copy of the grading rubric at the start of an assignment, and I like to provide a copy to parents in advance of a lesson.
These various templates are a great starting point for me, and they are off-the-shelf ready for new teachers, too!
Formatted Paper Guidelines, Formatted Paper Templates
If you are in college, you are familiar with the challenge of formatting papers in a particular documentation style (MLA, Chicago, Turabian, IEEE). OOO has ALL of the formats ready for you to use! I totally wish they had this kind of template when I was in college. Be careful, though, and always make sure you use the correct style as instructed by your professor.
Grid Paper
If your son is in high school, and it is 11:00pm when he decides to start his math homework, NEVER FEAR! OOO has printable grid paper for FREE! No more midnight Walmart runs!
Gradebook Templates
There are several different kinds of gradebook templates, and you can customize each one to your liking. I love that they are set up to do the math for you!
Personal
There are lots of times when you need to make a certain type of document for your kids or for the country club. Who has time to search all over the web when you can stop by OOO and get what you need for free?
Recipe Cards
Every organization I have ever belonged to has made a recipe book as a fundraiser. Since I don't cook much, I always struggle to remember what a recipe actually looks like.
OOO has a fantastic selection of recipe card templates that make the job of sharing recipes so easy!
March Madness and Sports Grids
A little friendly competition among friends is fun, but it can be such a pain to figure out those charts for Final Four! OOO comes to the rescue! Just print these out, and you have instant success.
Shopping List Templates
If you live in a place like Lakeville, you only get to a big grocery store once a month. Instead of just using slips of napkin, we printed out two of OOO's shopping lists and we use one at the Big-Ole Grocer and the other at the Farmer's Market.
It saves us so much time, and I don't have to find those little slips of paper!
Family Budget Planners
There are all sorts of different kinds of budgets and planners to download and print. There are, literally, pages and pages of different ways to organize your cash. This is just one example, but there are so many more that you might like!
Creative Writing Tools and Templates for Script Writing
Script writing software is expensive. Comic book layout software is expensive. Generally, most folks that want to write these kinds of ditties don't have the income to afford them. OOO has a whole host of resources for the aspiring writer.
Need to write a commercial? Want to write a memoir of your life? Need to format a screenplay? OOO has the tools for you!
The Bottom Line
Open Office has awesome templates for every possible situation. The best part is that these resources are fast to download (on any platform) and are FREE! Let us know what Open Office templates YOU like.