OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas

Fantastic OpenOffice.org Writer extension for searching and replacing carriage returns (two in a row, etc.) with regular expressions, plus much much more

If you've been typing $^$ into the regular OpenOffice Writer search and replace dialog and coming up empty, try this plugin. It's awesome. It lets you look for a series of empty paragraph returns, or a carriage return at the end of a paragraph plus one empty return, and MUCH much more.

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/AltSearch

Download then choose Tools > Extension Manager to install. Restart OOo and you'll see a new icon in the upper left corner on the main toolbar.

Here's the page.

 

Here's the icon you get when you restart OpenOffice.

 

Here's the window.

 
 Here's the list of regular expression options.

 

And here's an example of what the shown expression found.

 

Free Microsoft Office templates for Word, for use with OpenOffice Writer

As I posted yesterday, you can use OpenOffice.org with most of the templates out there. Writer/Word, Calc/Excel, and Impress/Powerpoint. Also remember that OpenOffice opens .docx files without any extra help.

So google away, find your Word or Excel template, download it, and follow the steps in yesterday's post to save it in OpenOffice template format in your own template collection. Here's one of many sites. http://www.docstoc.com/

Here's the only difference: it's after you've saved it. Instead of being able to access it the way you do with Impress, you choose File > New > Templates and Documents to get it.

 

Then you'll see a window with all your templates. It might be in a folder of templates like My Templates or it might be at the top of all your folders. You can tell by the info in the title bar. The template will be in the folder you picked when you chose File > Templates > Save. Then just double-click and you're good.