First Incompability with Office/Open Office

I opened a Powerpoint that I had done for students showing them how you could hyperlink within a Powerpoint Presentation in Impress. Hyperlinking allows you to link text from a presentation to another page in the same presentation or to a different document or web site. In this case, it was a link that took you to another card in the presentation. I have the students create these to learn how to think non-linear and also write some amazing Choose Your Own Adventure stories.
Anyway, this is not a good sign that Open Office didn't recognize the Hyperlinks I had made in Powerpoint. I was able to go into Open Office and change the links to make them work. This doesn't take long if you know where you wanted to link them to. Both programs allow you to make the hyperlinks in the same say. You highlight what you want to click on to make the choice, in the Choose your Own adventure scenerio, you highlight the choice that you want to make. When the text is highlighted, you go to insert and choose Hyperlink. You can then select what card you want this link to go to. This is going to require some extra research on my part to see if I can find a way to get the kinks out of this project.

Powerpoint Slides - selecting small or hidden objects

I have been neglecting the Powerpoint /Presentation part of Microsoft Office/Open Office. I have found a great tip that works exactly the same in both programs.

If you have an object - text or writing - that is in the powerpoint and you can't easily find the object to move it or edit it, you need this tip. First, press escape so you are sure you don't have anything selected. Then press the tab key and you will see that the program will toggle you through all of the pieces that are on your slide.

I wish I would have known this trick earlier! Instead, I was moving the pieces around to find something that was hidden or not easy to select.

Text Box in Word Document

Recently, I was asked to help make a graduation program. The teacher wanted to have a text box in the document to highlight people she wanted to thank, but didn't know how to do it. I thought it would be a good idea to write the process here and check and see if it worked similarly with Open Office.
First, we changed the orientation of the page to landscape, not portrait. You do this by going to File - Page Setup - and changing the page orientation. Then we went to Format - and added two columns to the page.
We typed in the information, but then, wanted to add the box of information. You go to insert text box and the cursor will change to a cross hairs. This will allow you to draw whatever size of box you want. You can then put any information you want into the box.
In Open Office, my first problem was finding out where to change the orientation of the page. You can do this, but it is found in a different place. You go to FORMAT - Page and then can set the landscape piece there. The Columns were found in Format exactly as in Word. The text box is called a FRAME - You go to insert a frame, it will put a box on the page that you can resize to exactly what you want. If you go through all the options, it will allow you to change the look of the box.
The other amazing feature about OpenOffice is that while I was using it, it let me know that it had an update available to another version. I will soon be using 3.1.0 for Open Office!