OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas

The double-edged sword of the "Linked With" feature in heading styles, with tables of contents

When you create a table of contents, you specify which paragraph styles, applied to your headings, should show up in the table of contents.

 

No other styles except the ones you specify (in Outline Numbering, or in other ways) should be included.

So if I create a style called DontIncludeMe and apply it to some text, that text shouldn't end up in the table of contents (TOC), right?

 

You would think so. BUT here's the thing.

If other styles that you apply are Linked With styles that are set to appear in the TOC, then those styles WILL APPEAR IN THE TOC even though you didn't tell them too. Take a look at the Linked With field above, in the style formatting window.

Now, this isn't necessarily bad, just to my mind unexpected. Just be sure that you know this is how it works, then use the Linled With feature appropriately. You can choose None if you don't want the style you're creating or using to show up in the TOC unexpectedly.

Creating a hyperlinked table of contents

You can create a hyperlinked TOC in Writer that not only lets users click on an item to go to that page, but is still hyperlinked when you export the document to PDF.

1. Apply paragraph styles (Heading1, etc.) to your heading text and set up outline numbering (Tools > Outline Numbering) to specify which paragraph styles go with what level headings.

2. Choose Insert > Indexes and Tables > Indexes and Tables.

3. In the Index/table main tab, in the Evaluate Up To field, specify how many levels you want to see. Usually you want to see 2-3 levels.

4. Click the Entries tab. Follow the directions in the following illustration.

5. Click OK. You'll see the linked TOC.

Data type issues in spreadsheet-based mail merges in OpenOffice, or why your mail merge doesn't work with 3.2

Let's say you're putting together a mail merge listing the fees people in the county have to pay for getting their new cat license. You'd put together the spreadsheet data kind of like this, then create a database based on that spreadsheet.

Name    Fee

Bob      $12

Jean    $13

Your mail merge document, with the various prompts and the field names, would look kind of like this:

Name: <Name>

Fee for license: <Fee>

So far so good. But let's say that sometimes there's no fee, perhaps organizations don't need to pay for cat licenses. So your data might look like this:

Name                          Fee

Bob                             $12

Jean                            $13

Library                         N/A

BUT that will not work because mail merges as of 3.2 (possibly earlier) don't like you to mix your types of data in a column. You can have all text, like N/A, or all numbers like 12, but not both.

Here's an example of some test and screen shots I took.

Here's the spreadsheet.

Here's what is in the database, and therefore what a mail merge would have access to.

 

So: in the scenario I outlined you could:

just put in 0, or just blank, instead of N/A

OR do this, which is workable but a bit more complicated.

Name                          Fee        Applicable or Not

Bob                             $12      [leave blank] 

Jean                            $13      [leave blank] 

Library                  [leave blank]       N/A

Then for your mail merge put both the fee and the applicable or not fields next to the Fee prompt. If there's no data the field won't take up any room, and only the correct field will show.

Name: <Name>

Fee for license: <Fee><Applicable or Not>

Note: This change in 3.2 really is a proper approach to databases; having mixed types is not proper database structure. But it is probably causing a few headaches.

Formatting OpenOffice spreadsheet cells with DD/MM/YY

Things don't always work the way you expect. However, it's easy to make things work the right way with spreadsheet cells once you know how it works.

Let's say you want the day first, so that 12/1/10 is January 12th, not December 1st. You do this under Format > Cells. However, if you just change the format to DD/MM/YY manually, you might get some unexpected results. It's usually better to just switch the country/language for those cells.

Here's why. We'll start out "normal" with standard American English formatting, MM/DD/YY.

And now I switch the format code to DD/MM/YY manually...

But now when I type a new date into a cell I've formatted that way....

So switch the language to one that uses the date format you want. Then what you type stays in the same order.

New in OpenOffice 3.2: Notes in Drawings and Presentations

You can now insert notes in Drawings and Presentations, as you can in Writer. Just choose Insert > Comment.