OpenOffice.org Macros Explained Third Edition

By

Andrew Pitonyak

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What is this site?

The first edition of my book was published by Hentzenwerke, but, the book is no longer available in printed form and the price for used copies is very high. You can see the original listing here: OpenOffice.org Macros Explained. You can still purchase a PDF version from the publisher.

I am the author and you are reading my personal web site. The third edition is in progress and it has not yet been decided how the files will be distributed. For now, at least a portion of the book is available for immediate download. Note that I am far from finished with the third edition. Much of the content will remain the same, but the material is updated to reflect the newer versions of OOo.

I am writing the book using OOo. The current version embeds the macros with the document so that you can run many of the macros while reading the book. This is useful for verifying that a specific macro continues to function in the current OOo version.

One of my biggest fears while writing is that I will not be able to write this as a single document because of OOo bug 84159. Internally, OOo maintains an list of style changes. The list is stored in an array which has maximum size of 64K elements. If I understand the problem correctly, every time my character style changes, a new array entery is required. With multiple formatted code listings, I have many style changes. This is why AndrewMacro.odt crashes OOo when you close the document, and it is also why I rarely edit the document even though I have content to add.

Links related to the book

Original listing: OpenOffice.org Macros Explained.
Some chapters from the third edition of OpenOffice.org Macros Explained.odt last uploaded April 30, 2016 01:09:56 PM UTC.
There is also a PDF version last uploaded April 30, 2016 01:10:37 PM UTC.
I am neither an artist nor a designer, so, I hired Amanda Barham to create the cover art. I could not decide how whimsical I desired the cover to be.
Original listing on http://www.amazon.com.

Where Can I Purchase The Book?

To be determined.

How Does The Book Differ From Your Macro Document?

My Book presents material in an organized fashion designed to teach you the material as you read. My free macro document, on the other hand, is a less organized collection of examples with little explanatory text. If you want to learn and see many of the details with complete working examples, buy my book. If you want a large collection of miscellaneous examples, download my macro document. There is very little overlap between the examples in the book and the examples in my macro document, so you probably want both.