E-books, blueprints, free reports… in this first of a series of guides to producing content I want to show you how to easily create these using the free office suite software Open Office.

If you’ve not already got it, download it now from OpenOffice.org and go right ahead and install the package. What you get is a suite of 5 applications: Writer, which is a word processor to rival Microsoft Word, Calc which is a spreadsheet (like Excel), a Powerpoint style presentation application called Impress, a graphics tool called Draw, and finally Base, a database application.

These are all great applications, and they integrate well together as a productivity suite, but for our purposes we’re really only going to be interested in two of them - Writer and Impress.

If you’re at all familiar with Word, or any other well known word processor, then you’ll feel quite at home with Writer. In fact, most of the application works just like Word but with one massive advantage for us - you can export directly to PDF format!

PDF is pretty much the standard for ebooks and reports since it’s very portable (It isn’t called the Portable Document Format for nothing you know!) and can be opened on just about any system, fonts are embedded so your document will look pretty much the same on anyone’s computer, and probably the most important - it is basically a non-editable format. What that means is, unlike a Word document, if you open a PDF ebook you downloaded, you won’t be able to edit, or start adding to or changing the content.

Exporting a document as a PDF is dead simple - just click the red Export to PDF button on the toolbar and save it just like you would save a normal file. There’s no messing around with PDF print drivers or any of that nonsense - just one click!

Now, you could just type up a few pages, click export and bam - you’re done. But if you want to create a report or ebook that looks professional you’re going to want to spend a little time making it look nice with a good layout, and here’s where OpenOffice shines again by making it really easy to get your documents looking great.

First of all, you can apply a template to your document that will give your creation a professional look and tie the pages together. You could create your own, but why reinvent the wheel right? There are loads of places to get free OpenOffice ebook templates - just try a quick Google search.

Once you have your template, open it in OpenOffice (If you double click the template file it will open ready to edit - told you this was easy!) and start typing. Hit the PDF export button when you’re done, and you have created your first ebook!

Now, remember that I said we were interested in Writer and in Impress? Well the reason for that, is that you can also export presentations to PDF format to create an ebook. Earlier this year, when I started teaching my 1 Day Webmaster seminars, I sat down and created a 160 slide presentation which I use as the basis for my seminars. To create the manual which accompanies the seminar, I edited the slides putting notes and comments in key places, exported to PDF and I instantly had an ebook (in fact I print a hard copy and spiral bind it for my seminar delegates but you get the idea!).

The best part is, OpenOffice is compatible with Microsoft file formats, so if you have an old Powerpoint presentation, just open it in Impress, make any changes you feel necessary, hit the export to PDF button and you have an instant ebook - how cool is that!

Just a final note on that… Microsoft have never really liked competition much, and when they released their most recent version of MS Office they changed their own file formats so that programs like OpenOffice were no longer compatible. The old style MS formats had extensions like .doc for Word, and .xls for Excel. Well the new versions have an extra x after the extension (.docx, .xlsx etc.) and these are the ones which OpenOffice can’t read… but don’t worry I have a solution for you! Just head over to Docx Converter and upload your file, enter your email and click the button… The file will be converted into OpenOffice format and emailed to you for free - how’s that for service!

So there we go, a very quick and easy introduction to creating content and your own products. Whether it’s a free report to give to your email subscribers, or a full blown info product to sell on Clickbank, OpenOffice is more than capable.

Have fun, get creative, and tomorrow we’ll look at creating websites using the HTML editor Nvu.