OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas

What Are Styles? An Overview of Paragraph, Page, Character, and List Styles

Note: This is part of a three-part post on styles. See this post for the intro and links to the other posts.

Styles are recipes, or definitions, or paragraphs, of individual characters, of pages, and of lists. (Frames too but I find them less useful.)

Here are some illustrations.

 

Here are some pictures of the definition window. They look a lot like the formatting windows, but you choose Format > Styles and Formatting, then create styles from the Styles and Formatting window.

Everything starts by choosing Format > Styles and Formatting. You get the Styles and Formatting window.  Click the icon at the top for the kind of style you want: paragraph, character, etc.  Right-click in that window and choose New or Modify to get the editing window you want.

Click each thumbnail if you want a bigger view.

Paragraph style definition window:

Character style definition window:

Page style definition window:

List style definition window:

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Why Should You Use Styles?

Note: This is part of a three-part post on styles. See this post for the intro and links to the other posts.

Why should you use styles?

Lots and lots of reasons.

Styles Mean You Do the Formatting Once, Then Apply It Quickly Each Additional Time

Styles aren't so necessary for your short scathing memo to your intern, but anything longer and more complex will be a lot easier to format with styles.

Let's say you've got a 100-page white paper on how your company's flotsam server works. You've got these types of things in the document:

• Four levels of headings in various sizes and the same font (Arial)
• Regular body text in 12 point type and Times New Roman font
• Notes in bold, 10-point Arial, indented a half inch from the left
• Warnings bold and italic 10-point Arial, indented a half inch from the left
• Numbered lists with 1 at the top level, A at the 2nd level, and a special purple bullet at the third level

A cover page with no footer, introductory text that should be numbered in roman numerals, main body text with arabic numbers in the footer and the document title in the header, and two pages with big diagrams that need to be landscape (horizontal)

Do you really want to painfully do the formatting of every heading, every bulleted list, ever note and warning, every page, manually each time you have a new one?

You really don't.

With styles, you just do the formatting for each heading and each other formatted element of the document once, and then you just select the text and select the style each time you want to apply the formatting. Instead of selecting the text, clicking the Bold icon, clicking the Italic icon, selecting the font size, selecting the font, indenting the text....and so on for every freakin' individual chunk of differently formatted text.

Styles Mean You Can Update a Long Document's Formatting Easily

Let's say you wrote that 100-page white paper and formatted it manually. There's a layoff and you have a new manager who tells you that your paper needs to conform to the corporate marketing formatting standards. Which are completely different.

If you formatted it manually, you have days of work ahead of you.

If you formatted it with styles, you just need to either import a template from the corporate marketing group and be done with it. That's the best case scenario. If your marketing group isn't that organized, then you just need to update about 15 styles. That's all. When you update the styles, all the text says to itself “Oh, I'm Heading3, and Heading3 has changed. I'd better change too.”

Styles Are Required for a Lot of Essential Features in OpenOffice.org.

Do you want to create a table of contents? Do some fancy formatting in a table of contents or list? Do running headers? Do conditional formatting in a spreadsheet? You're going to need styles.

 

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Why Should You Use Styles?

Note: This is part of a three-part post on styles. See this post for the intro and links to the other posts.

Why should you use styles?

Lots and lots of reasons.

Styles Mean You Do the Formatting Once, Then Apply It Quickly Each Additional Time

Styles aren't so necessary for your short scathing memo to your intern, but anything longer and more complex will be a lot easier to format with styles.

Let's say you've got a 100-page white paper on how your company's flotsam server works. You've got these types of things in the document:

• Four levels of headings in various sizes and the same font (Arial)
• Regular body text in 12 point type and Times New Roman font
• Notes in bold, 10-point Arial, indented a half inch from the left
• Warnings bold and italic 10-point Arial, indented a half inch from the left
• Numbered lists with 1 at the top level, A at the 2nd level, and a special purple bullet at the third level

A cover page with no footer, introductory text that should be numbered in roman numerals, main body text with arabic numbers in the footer and the document title in the header, and two pages with big diagrams that need to be landscape (horizontal)

Do you really want to painfully do the formatting of every heading, every bulleted list, ever note and warning, every page, manually each time you have a new one?

You really don't.

With styles, you just do the formatting for each heading and each other formatted element of the document once, and then you just select the text and select the style each time you want to apply the formatting. Instead of selecting the text, clicking the Bold icon, clicking the Italic icon, selecting the font size, selecting the font, indenting the text....and so on for every freakin' individual chunk of differently formatted text.

Styles Mean You Can Update a Long Document's Formatting Easily

Let's say you wrote that 100-page white paper and formatted it manually. There's a layoff and you have a new manager who tells you that your paper needs to conform to the corporate marketing formatting standards. Which are completely different.

If you formatted it manually, you have days of work ahead of you.

If you formatted it with styles, you just need to either import a template from the corporate marketing group and be done with it. That's the best case scenario. If your marketing group isn't that organized, then you just need to update about 15 styles. That's all. When you update the styles, all the text says to itself “Oh, I'm Heading3, and Heading3 has changed. I'd better change too.”

Styles Are Required for a Lot of Essential Features in OpenOffice.org.

Do you want to create a table of contents? Do some fancy formatting in a table of contents or list? Do running headers? Do conditional formatting in a spreadsheet? You're going to need styles.

 

What Are Styles? An Overview of Paragraph, Page, Character, and List Styles

Note: This is part of a three-part post on styles. See this post for the intro and links to the other posts.

Styles are recipes, or definitions, or paragraphs, of individual characters, of pages, and of lists. (Frames too but I find them less useful.)

Here are some illustrations.

 

Here are some pictures of the definition window. They look a lot like the formatting windows, but you choose Format > Styles and Formatting, then create styles from the Styles and Formatting window.

Everything starts by choosing Format > Styles and Formatting. You get the Styles and Formatting window.  Click the icon at the top for the kind of style you want: paragraph, character, etc.  Right-click in that window and choose New or Modify to get the editing window you want.

Click each thumbnail if you want a bigger view.

Paragraph style definition window:

Character style definition window:

Page style definition window:

List style definition window:

Applying, Modifying, and Creating Styles in Writer

Note: This is part of a three-part post on styles. See this post for the intro and links to the other posts.
Note: Reader Michael gives this excellent tip: "To apply the Heading1 style, you can use the "Control+1" combination. Heading2 and 3 work the same way."

Note: See also a blog on a related topic, templates.

How do you create styles? Or edit them, or apply them?

Basically, you create styles by choosing Format > Styles and Formatting. Then right-click in the empty part of that Styles and Formatting window and choose New. (Or select an existing style, right-click on it, and choose Edit.) Then make your formatting choices and click OK.

To apply a style, just select the character (or word), the paragraph (just click in it), the list, or the page, and double-click the style.

But you probably wanted a little more detail. I'm going to show how to modify a paragraph style, and create a page style. The principles are the same for all types of styles, however,

 

Applying a Style

Choose Format > Styles and Formatting. The Styles and Formatting window will appear.

Click the icon for Paragraph, Character, Page, or List styles, depending on what kind of style you want to apply.

Select the text or page in your document you want to apply the style to.

Double-click the style in the Styles and Formatting window.

Tip: The Styles dropdown list shows all the applied paragraph styles in your document. You can apply a paragraph style by selecting text, then selecting the style you want from that list.

Note: To switch from one page style to another, see this post.

 

You basically just click at the bottom of one page, choose Insert > Manual Break, in the list in the window that appears select the page style you want for the next page, and click OK.

 

Modifying a Page Style

Let's say you use the Heading1 style a lot but it's not what you want. Here's the Heading 1 style in the Styles and Formatting window, and what it looks like by default before you modify it.

It's nice but you want to punch it up.

Choose Format > Styles and Formatting.

In the Styles and Formatting window, right-click on the Heading 1  and choose Modify.

Click the Font tab and choose another font.

Click the other tabs and make changes that you want.

Click OK.

All the text where Heading 1 style is applied will be updated with the changes you made.

Creating a Page Style

You need to create a new page style for the document you're writing.

Choose Format > Styles and Formatting.

Click the Page Styles icon at the top.

Right-click in an empty part and choose New.

In the Organizer tab, name the style.

In the Page tab, specify margins and any other important information.

In the Footer tab, if you want a footer, mark the checkbox.

Make any other selections in other tabs.

Click OK.

Click in the page where you want the page style and double-click the page style in the Styles and Formatting window.

If you need to add footer or header content, do it now. Scroll to the header or footer and type or insert the content. To add a page number to a footer, for instance, click in the footer and choose Insert > Fields > Page Number. (Be sure text  boundaries are showing; choose View > Text Boundaries.)

Getting Styles From One Document to Another

Let's say that you've got styles in one document, document A. You love your styles, they're working' for you. That's great. Now you've got document B that needs to have those styles too. What do you do?

One option is to paste the contents of document B into document A. You can just paste, or Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text to make things unstyled. Then apply styles to the text you just pasted in.

A variation on that is to create a template from the document where you have your styles, then paste document B into that new template. Take document A, choose File > Templates > Save, put it in My Templates, call it My Styles Template, and click OK.
Then choose File > New > Templates and Documents, select the Templates icon on the left, open your My Templates category, and open My Styles Template. Then repeat the steps from the previous option to paste the contents of document B into that new empty template based on document A.

You can also load the styles from document A into document B.  To load styles in 2.x into a specific document, go to document B, where you need to bring your styles. Choose Format > Styles and Formatting. Find the far-right top icon with the black downward-pointing triangle, click on it, and choose Load Styles.

In the styles window that appears, mark all the types of styles you want to bring in from your template, and select Overwrite. Then click From File, select your document A file, and click Open.

Those document A styles are now in document B. Just apply the newly loaded styles as necessary. If there are different style names in B than you want used, you need to apply your A styles. If the names are the same and you just want the A definitions used, then you're done.

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Tags

OpenOffice.org  open office  OpenOffice.org training  open office training  open source  open source training  Office 12  Linux  Ubuntu  education  templates    styles  

Centering Text Vertically in a Page (Writer): Using Frames, Text Boxes, and a One-Celled Table

I've gotten this question several times, and though it's a specialized question and a bit of a cluge answer, I think it's a good idea to post.

How do you automatically center text vertically on a page? For instance, if you have a title page and you want the title text centered vertically, how do you do that?

You don't do it with regular text; I haven't found a way to do that, at least. But you can do it with a text box.

Update March 11th: After much reading and discussion with Ross, Peter, Aspuldo, and others, I have finally zeroed in on the key thing about how to do this with frames. Phew!

Using a Frame

As Ross points out, this is approach survives changing the page size, orientation, or margins.

1. Open a new text document, or go to the page in your document where you want a vertically centered page.

2. Choose Insert > Frame.

3. Set the circled options in the Type tab. Key is, at the top, just make the frame about a line of text high; make the text autosize vertically; anchor to page (I hear you don't have to but that's how it works for me) and at the bottom, align the frame vertically at the center.

4. If you want, go to the Border tab and take off the border. You can also do this later once you've inserted the frame.

5. Click OK.

6. You get something like this.

7. Now just type, and the centering will happen.

Using a Text Box

This isn't as good a way, but it's a way.

1. Open a new text document, or go to the page in your document where you want a vertically centered page.

2. If the to-be-centered text is already on that page, like “John's Thesis on Eye Boogers,” select it and press Ctrl X to cut out the text. You'll have it ready to paste in later. (Or just delete it if you don't care about pasting.)

3. Choose View > Toolbars > Drawing. The Drawing toolbar will appear at the bottom of the work area, most likely. For this and all other icons in this post, click on the illustration to get a larger popup window.

4. Click the Text icon, far right in this illustration.

5. Draw a text box as big as the page.

6. Then immediately paste (Ctrl + V) your text that you cut out previously, if you did that, or just type the text that you want centered vertically. (If you don't type something in the text box, it'll disappear.)

7. Right-click on the text box border and choose Text. It should look like this, with green borders.

8. In the Text window, look for the Text Anchor section. Choose a centered point for the text box, as shown.  Click OK.

Now the text is centered vertically within the text box.

9. Because you likely want this too, click the Center icon on the Formatting toolbar to center the text horizontally, too.

10. Make the text bigger and format it the way you want.

11. The page should look something like this.

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Tags

OpenOffice.org    open office    OpenOffice.org training    open office training   open source   open source training   Office 12   Linux    table    text box    frames   vertically  center    centering text vertically   

All About Styles in OpenOffice.org Writer

Styles are like wearing your seatbelt, eating your broccoli, and apologizing to your honey even when you think you're right. They might be a bit of a pain to make yourself do, but they will so save your butt in the long run.

This is going to be a big ol' post, grouped into a few different ones.

• What are styles?
• Why should everyone absolutely use styles?
• How do you create and modify styles?

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Creating Tables of Contents (TOCs) in OpenOffice.org

I've been updating my workbooks to OpenOffice.org 2.0, and am posting another procedure, creating tables of contents. TOCs are actually pretty slick, a lot of my students say that the TOC tool in OpenOffice.org Writer is easier and more powerful than in Word.

There are just a couple things that aren't obvious, though, so if you're going to be doing anything with tables of contents, take a look at this.

• Lessons for creating tables of contents
• Lab files (zip file) to use in the lessons

The lessons cover topics like basic TOCs, editing the format of the TOC, specifying what heading levels and styles are in the TOC, and creating a hyperlinked TOC so that when you click on an item in the table of contents, you go directly to that heading in the document.

It's quite similar to the process in OpenOffice.org 1.x, so if you're an expert in the previous release, don't worry about learning anything new on this topic.

How to Create Your Own Toolbar, and Manage 2.0 Icons and Toolbars

Note: See also a related article I wrote for TechTarget.com.

I've been updating my workbooks to OpenOffice.org 2.0. One of the big differences is the look and feel, i.e. the toolbars. They have different icons to show you how to see the whole toolbar, and you view them differently.

It's not hard, but it's definitely different than 1.x. So here's an excerpt from my OpenOffice.org 2.0 Core Office Suite workbook that describes how to do a bunch of stuff with the new toolbar system.

• Create your own toolbar or add icons to an existing toolbar with the Customize Toolbar option
• View toolbars, dock or undock toolbars, and view extra icons with the Visible Buttons option

Starting Page Numbering on Page 2, and Other Ways to Mix Page Styles in a Document

All right. It's the elephant in the room, and it's time to address it.

How do you have no page number on the first page, then have the second page start with the page number 1 in the footer? Or with page number 42, or 623?

(Or how do you have a landscape page in a portrait document?)

Good question. It's a common one. It's actually not more complex than the tax code, but there's some setup you need to do that's a little more complicated than the task at hand. I would like to see a checkbox/field combination somewhere  that would let you specify "For this document, start the page footer on page __ and make the first page number be ___". However, for now, we do it this way.

There are two things to control in this situation:
- Whether there is a page number in the footer--i.e. whether there is any number at all in there, regardless of what it is.
- If there is a page number in the footer, what that page number is.

You control the first with page styles: you set up the page style, say "yes, there's a footer and a page number in it" or "no, no stinkin' page numbers here" and then apply that page style.

You control the second a few different ways. I'm going to show you the most straightforward which is just to create a page break, switch to a different page style, and specify what the page number for that page is.: 1, 42,  623, or anything else.

Let's look at part 1 first.  Page styles are actually a really nice, useful feature.

Part 1: Setting Up Page Styles

Bring up the document you're working with.  Remove any page breaks you've put in between the first and second pages. This sample  document I'm using has some text that clearly goes on a cover page, and then it runs immediately into the content text that should start on page 2.

For any of these images, just click on any of them that are too small for you to read. (They mostly all are, but you might not need to get more detail on all of them.)

Here's my sample document. I want no page number on the first page and page number 1 on the 2nd page.

Choose Format > Styles and Formatting. In that window, click the Page Styles icon at the top.

Right-click in the blank part and choose New. You're going to make the page styles you need.

In the Organizer tab of the page styles window, just name the style  something like Cover Page. This is the one with no footer and no page number.

You actually don't need to do anything else. But just to make sure it's clear when we're applying the styles in this procedure, I'm going to suggest that you  click the Background tab and give it the  light gray background.

Click OK.

Now, right-click in a blank part of the Styles and Formatting window again, and choose New. This time you're creating the other page style, the one for the main body where you're going to have a page number and start it at 1. Call it Main Body or something, in the Organizer tab.

Then click the Footer tab and turn it on by marking the checkbox.

That's all you really need to do, so click OK.

Part 2: Applying a Page Style, Then Switching to Another

Click in the first page of the document, where you want the Cover Page page style. In the Styles and Formatting window, double-click the Cover Page style you created. The style will be applied, as you can tell from the gray background.

The style is applied not only to that page, but to the entire document. That's what's supposed to happen at this point.

Now you're ready to switch. So click to the left of the first word where you want to switch, the first word of the next page usually. Or click to the right of the last word on the current page. Whatever works. Here I've clicked to the left of "Why".

Choose Insert > Manual Break. In the window that appears, just tell it that now you want to switch to the Main Body page style by selecting it in the list.

That second page is also really the first content page of the document, so you'd like it to be page 1. So select the page numbering checkbox and specify 1. (Or any number you want.)

Click OK.

A page break will be inserted where your cursor was, and the new page style you specified, Main Page, will be applied from that page on in the document.

Now, there's one more step. You've already created the footer for that Main Page style, but it's time to put content in it.  I.e., the page number. This is easy. Just scroll to the bottom of the first content page (the second page), type the word page and a space if you want, then choose Insert > Fields > Page Number. The page number will appear. And  you already specified that on this page where the page style switches to MainPage, the page numbering should restart at 1.  So it restarts at 1. (If you had specified page number 42 earlier, this number would be 42.)

That's All There Is To It

Just create the styles you want, apply the first style, then just switch page styles the way we did in this example.

Tips for Landscape and Portrait in the Same Document

To have a landscape page in a portrait document, just create a page style and select the Landscape option of the Page tab. So in this example, you could create a third page style, call it Landscape or Horizontal. Switch to it the way we did here with the manual break, but just don't change the page number.

Tips for Automatic Switching From One Page Style to Another

If you want to automatically switch from one page style to another, you have two options.

In the page style definition window, click the Organizer tab and find the Next Style list. You'll still need to insert manual page breaks sometimes but you won't have to switch styles as we did earlier.

In the paragraph style definition window, click the Text Flow tab and find the section in the middle dealing with creating a page break with a particular page style on the next page.

Or try using all three approaches together.

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Using the Gallery to Set Up Frequently Used Images for UML Diagrams, D&D Maps, and Anything Illustrated

Note: One great source for images is http://www.openclipart.org/.

I've talked about a few things so far in this series on Draw that will give you some pretty decent power for creating flow charts, UML diagrams, and just plain pretty pictures.

• Making your own line ends, including unfilled arrows for UML diagrams
• A grand day out with Draw--getting to know all the new 2.0 features
• 3D extravaganza with Draw

Here's another step that will help the diagram folks in particular.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 has many great prefab shapes but none of them is of a server cluster. What do you do? Other software packages have all the prefab symbols, images, graphics, etc. that you could want. Mmm....feeling the dark side of the force tempting me to come back to Visio...mmm....

 

No need. You can just get the images you need and put'em in OpenOffice.org.

 

We're not going to go into detail and talk about copyright law--let's just say you've got all the rights you need to all the images you're going to use.

 

You collect all the images you want to use in your diagrams in the gallery. Turn on the gallery with the Gallery icon (shows in the top of your work area typically in Writer, and the bottom in Draw).

Then just find the category you want, and drag any of the images into your document. Once it's there you can resize it or do whatever you want. (Click the thumbnail to see a slightly larger image, for this and any other images that are a little small.)

So I'll walk through how this is done.

Adding Images to the Gallery

Let's say you do a lot of system diagrams and it's just not working for you to draw all the symbols from scratch. Go find the images you need; on the Internet, in other documents, whatever. Save them all in a directory called diagramsymbols, or something.

 

Start up OpenOffice.org; we'll do this in Draw. Click the Gallery icon to view the gallery.

 

OpenOffice.org comes with a predefined empty theme called My Theme. Theme is just a directory, basically.

Select it, right-click and choose Properties to rename it and put files in it.

Note: You could click New Theme and get the same results.

 

You'll see the theme definition window. In the General tab, give the theme a good name like Network Symbols. (Click the thumbnail to see a slightly larger image, for this and any other images that are a little small.)

   

Click the Files tab, where you'll add files to the them. The quickest way is to just click the Find Files button.

 

Navigate to the directory where your network symbol graphics are, and just select that directory, not files inside it.

 

Back in the theme definition window, you must also click Add All.

 

The files will be added, so just click OK in the theme definition window once that's done.

Note: To add just one at a time, you would click Add  in the theme definition window, and then navigate to a specific file.

Add the Pictures by Dragging

 

Now you've got pictures in your theme, and you can drag them into any document in Writer, Draw, Impress, or Calc.

In another post, I'll show how to take the gallery, the line ends you've defined, and a little fairy dust (if desired) to create complex diagrams.

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Printing Envelopes in OpenOffice.org 2.0

I don't usually link to other content but I get a lot of questions about envelopes. A lot. I wrote an article for TechTarget.com about how to do envelopes in OpenOffice.org 2.0, and for this post I'm just going to link to it.  : )

I included some templates there; here are the same envelope templates for OpenOffice.org 2.0.

• Envelope template, not hooked up to a data source, using frames
• Envelope template, not hooked up to a data source, not using frames

The article is long and detailed. Here's the key point. You need to get to know your printer and let it know to expect envelope shapes, not letter or A4 shapes. You also need to fiddle around for a while and figure out where--left, right, perpendicular, parallel--in the tray your printer expects envelopes. Buy a box of cheap envelopes and expect to waste a few while you experiment.

Then make sure that your envelope document is set up to print to the envelope size your printer is expecting. Envelope 10 is good.

You can type in your data for the envelope or use a data source. My article goes over both.

The simplest way is to just choose File > New > Envelope, then Format > Page Size and instead of Letter or A4, choose Envelope 10 and change the orientation to landscape.  Then either with standard margin formatting or with frames, put the text where you want.

You can also choose Insert > Envelope, and use the three-tabbed window that appears.

Then just print the envelope. (If you're using data sources, click Yes in the dialog box that appears.)

The next time you want envelopes, just use that same document you already created, and change the addresses. Either save the document in myimportantdocuments\envelopes, or if you're a template kind of person, make it a template.

Note: Doing it in 2.0 is quite similar to how to do it in OpenOffice.org 1.1. Here are my posts how to do that; they're excerpted from my OpenOffice.org workbooks.

• OpenOffice.org 1.x Mail Merges, Envelopes, and Labels
• OpenOffice.org 1.x Plain Labels and Envelopes

Tip on Printer Setup
Some of the pain of envelopes is the printer setup. Here's a GREAT tip from Miriam:
"I just read your envelope printing tip. Instead of constantly changing and checking the printer settings, I add another instance of the printer, configure it for envelopes and name it "envelope." When I want to print an envelope I choose this printer instead of the default one. That way my settings are always the same."

Envelope Mantra
Here's the other main point I want to make sure everyone understands.

Envelopes aren't too bad once you figure out how to do it the first time. Honest.

I hope the article helps.