OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas

Merry Christmas! An Easier Way to Start Page Numbering at 1 on the Second Page

Note: Upon further testing, this works fine as described but the table of contents does not reflect the offset correctly. Sorry!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was answering comments on this blog about starting page numbering on page 2, when I mentioned the page number offset, and how it doesn't work.

And I thought, well, I haven't tested this in OpenOffice.org 2.1 yet.

Hmmm......

And then I grinned broadly as it worked exactly the way it used to.  BUT that's OK because how it functions is perfect for when you don't want a page number on page 1, and you want the second page to be page 1. (Or the third page to be page 1, etc.)

This means that if you want, and if it suits your document, you can totally skip the whole big thing with page styles simply by inserting the page number field in your footer as usual, then double-clicking the page field and typing a negative page offset.

Here's the poop.

What the Page Offset Is

When you insert a page number in a header or footer (or in your page content), you get a page number, of course. This is a FIELD, which means it's not just text, it's got intelligence built into it. The gray shading indicates it's a field.

You can double-click the page number and you get this window.

The Offset fields at the bottom right is what we're interested in here. Type in 4 and your first page number will be 5; type in -2 and your first page number will be -3.

Seems like this could be useful, yes? Well, kind of. Read on.

The Way It Works That Doesn't Do You Any Good, and the Reason I Hadn't Talked About the Offset Before

If you type 4 in the Offset field, then the first page number to appear will be 5. (It would normally be 1, so an offset of 4, 1+4, is 5.)

Here's what that looks like in the window.

Here's the effect on the first page in the document.

Here's the effect on another page in the document. So far so good.

But here's the effect on one of the last four pages  (4 is the offset) in the document. No freakin' page number at all. There's gray but nothing will actually print.

So: when you type in a positive offset, where x = your offset number, the last x pages of the document don't have a page number.

The Way It Works That Is Useful For You, and Exactly How You Can Use This for Documents With Pages You Don't Want Numbered

Positive offset isn't that usefull, but negative offset is verra nice

Let's say you have a cover page, and your content is the second page. You want no page number on the cover page and you want "1" to appear in the footer of the second page.

So you want 1 of your pages to have no page number in the footer. Your offset is therefore -1.

Here's what you do.

Insert the page field number as usual. (To add the footer, choose Insert > Footer > Default. Click in the footer text box that appears and choose Insert > Fields > Page Number.)

Double-click the inserted page number.

In the fields window, type -1 in the Offset field.

And here's the result on your first page. Look at that! It's gray,  so that means nothing will print! Which is exactly what you want!

And here's what the first page of content looks like, i.e. the second page of your document. Again, this is exactly what you want -- the number 1.

And since the numbers disappeared at the beginning of the document, not at the end, you get the correct page numbers all the way to the end of your document.

This is great. Much easier than page styles; my apologies for not bringing it to everyone's attention earlier.

If you want the page number 1 to appear on your second page, use the offset -1.
If you want the page number 1 to appear on your third page, use the offset -2.

And so on.

---

Creating Two or More Pages of OpenOffice Labels Without Using a Mail Merge

Lots of people complain that in OpenOffice.org you only get one page of labels from the File > New > Labels wizard.

One  way to get around that is to not enter the data manually; use a database and create a mail merge.  Then you'll still just see one page in the label document but OpenOffice.org will print as many sheets of labels as necessary for the data.

1. Click here to create the mail merge.
2. Click here to create labels based on the mail merge.

However, if you do want to manually type two or more pages of labels, here's what I recommend. Use the labels from WorldLabel.com. They're composed of  invisible-border tables so it's easier to just create a new page, then copy the table and paste it onto the new page.

For more detail on that, see http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/free_open_document_labels?page=0%2C2  and find the section called  Copying the first page to make additional pages. 

To see the whole article on using WorldLabel and regular label templates, click here.

 

---

Modify the Layout of Prefab OpenOffice Labels Under File > New > Labels

Note: For other label tweaking tips, click here and here.

I was just putting together the mailing labels for my books (thanks everyone!) and the 8163 label layout built into OpenOffice.org was too wide for my printer.

What to do?

Changing the margins seems like the first thing to do. But when I do that, the layout skews. The page thinks there isn't enough room for both columns of labels so the second column of labels jumps to the second page.

Then I thought, well, I'll  shrink the width of the little frame things that the text is in.

When you try to do that, though, you get the Ghostbusters symbol that indicates "no changing anything here, buddy."

However, you can change the frame so that its size and position are no longer protected.

Some of you, reading along, are saying, "Um, Solveig....there's that adjustment window in the freakin' label creation window for just such purposes. Why not use that?" That's a good one too. ;> If you haven't already typed or pasted a lot of content into your actual label document, at least.

So here are some ways to tweak your labels. These apply to the prefab ones used through the File > New > Labels window. The ones you get from WorldLabel are made from tables, not frames, so the font modification items might work but the frame stuff is irrelevant.

Tweaking Label Size in the Label Window Before You Create the Label Document

Choose File > New > Labels.

Select the correct page size and label number, such as Letter and 8163.

Click the Format tab.

The Left Margin field is what you want to increase, if the left side of your labels are getting cut off. Increase it just a tad, perhaps to .3.  Or if your margins are getting cut off on top, change the Top Margin measurement. Then click New Document to create the label, if you're ready.

The new label document will have a slightly bigger  margin to give you some breathing room. (Or it will otherwise reflect the change you made in the Format tab.)

Tweaking Already-Created Label Documents

If you've got your document and you don't want to re-create it, here's some stuff you can do. Be forewarned that it is harder to control than the previous approach.

Here's the sample I'm working with; there's content only in the top two rows just from sheer laziness on my part. ;>

Right-click on the top left frame and choose Frame.

In the Frame window, go to the Options tab and unmark the Size and Position checkboxes.

Click OK.

If you want, you can just physically drag the frames one by one. Or use this approach to modify their dimensions all at once.

Choose Format > Styles and Formatting. Be sure that Frame styles are displayed. Right-click on the Labels style and choose Modify.

Now you can do whatever works in your layout. Make the label slightly narrower, perhaps 3.75  or 3.8.

Click OK. This will update the measurements of all the frames.

Choose Format > Page. In the Page tab, set the left margin to something a tad larger, like .3. Make sure the right-hand margin is .01 or something similarly small. You want to make sure there's enough room on the left side to get all your content in on the left without it being cut off and a too-wide right margin will goof that up.

Click OK.

Your labels should have a little more space on the left now, without the content being cut off.

Alternate Approach to Indenting Text From Left
I tried this once but the frames went kaflooie. Then I tried it again and it was fine. See how it works for you.

If you haven't selected the Synchronize checkbox, use this approach to quickly reformat. Choose Format > Styles and Formatting. Be sure paragraph styles are showing, and that all of them are showing.

Right-click on Default and choose Modify.

Now you can update the Default style, used by the label text.  In the Indents and Spacing tab, specify a left indent of .2 or .3.

Click OK.  All label formatting will be updated to add more space to the left.

 

One-Step Reformatting of Label Contents
If you haven't selected the Synchronize checkbox, use this approach to quickly reformat: make all your label content 17 point red Arial Bold or whatever you want.

Choose Format > Styles and Formatting. Be sure paragraph styles are showing, and that all of them are showing.

Right-click on Default and choose Modify.

Now you can update the Default style, used by the label text.  In the Font tab you can of course change the font.

Click OK.  All label formatting will be updated.

---

Using Master Documents to Combine Spreadsheets as Well as Writer Documents

I've written an article for TechTarget.com about how to bring spreadsheets into master documents, too. You link the spreadsheet to a Writer document, then bring that "dummy" writer document into your master document. It's a hack but a practical hack since big publications often need to combine different document types. There's an approach (even hackier, but useful) for bringing in presentation content, too.

If you haven't read the first article on plain old master documents, read that first.

 

---

TechTarget Article: Using Master Documents in OpenOffice Writer

I've written an article for TechTarget.com about using master documents in OpenOffice.org Writer.

http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid39_gci1230368,00.html

Master documents are used to combine lots of other Writer documents. They're similar to Word master files or Frame book files in that they organize your subdocuments, let you create a unified table of contents, etc.  They're a bit picky but once you've got them set up, they work quite reliably.

 

---

Word Filter for Writer

A new filter is being worked on for opening Word files in Writer. I don't necessarily follow the technical description here, from Henning Brinkmann but it's good to know that things might get even better.

 

---

Jumping to Particular Spots, and Rearranging Content, in an OpenOffice Writer Document, and Using Draw

Moving Around Easily Between Sections in the Navigator

I saw this question on LiveJournal by madscience but couldn't post an answer because of the Friends Only setting. I thought it was a good question, though, so I'll post it here.

"Is it possible to set up chapters or sections in an OpenOffice Writer document so that I can jump to them easily, like maybe with tabs or a tree like some PDFs have? I found something called "sections" in the documentation, but it doesn't sound like what I'm looking for.'

Definitely. Press F5 and you'll see the Navigator window.

You can expand the Headings option and just double-click the heading name to jump to that part of the document.

(This is only if you've used the Heading1 through Heading10 styles, or if you've used other styles for your headings and set them up at the right levels under Tools > Outline Numbering.)

You can also jump to anything listed in that window that you have set up--graphics, bookmarks (Insert > Bookmark), cross references, notes, etc.

You're right, sections aren't what you want, but if you have them you can double-click them in Navigator and go to them.

Rearranging Sections in Writer by Moving Headings in the Navigator

You can move one section of your document to an earlier or later part of the document easily in the Navigator too. Again, you need to have applied paragraph styles to your headings such as Heading1, Heading2, etc.

In the Navigator, just select the heading for the section you want to move.

Then click the Promote Chapter icon or the Demote Chapter icon as many times as needed to move the section to where you want it. In this picture, the 1950s and Bread section now comes before Romans and Bread.

Other Good Alternative Open Source Software

Another question from LiveJournal from fadedletterlost

"Alternative Software
I love alternative software, especially when it is a piece of free software that does basically the same function as a far more expensive version. What are some good alternative softwares that you have found?

MS Office alternative: OpenOffice
Photoshop?
Movie Creation Software?
First Person Shooter?

So on and so forth..."

A lot of people do stuff in Photoshop or Gimp that is easier to do in OpenOffice Draw. (File > New > Drawing.) If you're doing diagrams or anything that's not direct raster editing, do it in Draw, then export to EPS, JPG, PNG, whatever.

You do have slight raster control in Draw -- adjust RGB, make things B/W or grayscale, control contrast and lightness, etc.

---

Searching and Replacing: Replacing One Style With Another, in OpenOffice

I wrote this blog about how to rename styles in your current document to match the style names in a different template or document, then import styles from that different template or document to update the definitions.

Now, that's a reasonable approach. More or less. Renaming can be useful also if you just realize, d'oh! you really should be renaming things something like Directive_Heading, Directive_Text, rather than Textfordirectives and headingtouseindirectives. It's nice to have all the styles you use together sorted together alphabetically.

But unfortunately the Nancy Drew in me is sometimes drawn more toward hacks than to regular ol' features already there in the software.

Felipe wrote to that post and said "Is there a way to search and replace styles?"

And I slapped myself on the forehead and said, "Well, yes, that feature DOES exist and that would, OK, be a perfectly reasonable way to deal with replacing one style with another."

So here's the scenario.

You have a wonderful document with great styles.

But then Bob the Annoying Boss comes along and says "You need to use THIS template with THESE styles."

If all the names of the styles were the same you could just import the styles and be done with it. BUT the styles in the template are DIFFERENT so it's not that simple.

What do you do?

Follow the instructions in this blog if you want to try that approach to rename the styles in your document to match the ones in the template.

Or just search for your style names, and replace them with the style names from the template.

Here's how to do the second one.

Step 1: Import styles from the new template

Open your document.

Choose Format > Styles and Formatting.

Click and hold down on the far right icon and choose Load Styles.

In the next window, mark all the checkboxes and click From File.

Find the file with the styles you need to use and click Open.

That document's styles will show up in your Styles and Formatting window.

Step 2: Search for Your Styles and Replace With the New Styles

Be sure you're in your document.

Choose Edit > Find and Replace or just press Ctrl F.

In the Find and Replace window, click More Options and select only the Search for Styles item. NOTE: An alert reader, Julian, has this warning. "The option to search for styles disappears if you have specified some formatting in one of the search or replace boxes. Clicking No Format brings it back."

In the  first dropdown list, select the style in your document, and in the other dropdown list, select the style you just imported that you want to replace the existing style with.

Click Find, then Replace as appropriate. Or if you're feeling confident, click Replace All.

Repeat for each style you need to replace.

You'll see that the old styles have been replaced by the new styles. (In this illustration, the style ChapterTitle used to be applied, and it looked like the style illustrated near the top of this blog.)

---

Making Life Much Easier in OpenOffice Writer by Selecting Non-Consecutive Pieces of Text

I've mentioned this in the context of various articles before but I don't think I've really zeroed in on it before.

Selecting text and formatting it, whether manually or with styles, is one of the standard tasks you do every day. Let's say you've got a few notes, interspersed in your document, that need to be bold. They're not consecutive so you select one, then apply formatting; select the next then apply the formatting again and so on.

Select, apply; select, apply. It's one of each.

Or IS it???

You can select a bunch of pieces of text that aren't next to each other, and then apply whatever formatting you like. (Or delete all the pieces of text, or do anything.)

So:

1. Select the first piece of text.  (If you're applying a paragraph or list style, you just need to select a part of the paragraph.)

2. Hold down the Ctrl key and keep it held down.

3. Select the next piece of text.

4. Select the next piece of text.

5. When you're done, release the Ctrl key.

6. Now apply the formatting or just generally have your way with the text.

7. You'll see the formatting change.

8. Click somewhere else in the document to deselect the text.

 

---

Restarting Numbering in OpenOffice Writer: Yes, Virginia, There Is a Way to Do This Without Manual Labor

OpenOffice Writer numbering is powerful but it lacks at least one very important feature.

(I’m not saying Word numbering doesn’t suck. I think it does. )

Now, it’s not all bad. Anyone doing a nice little shopping list like this is going to have no problem.

1. Beer

   1. Light

   2. Dark

2. Bread

   1. Rye

      1. Russian

      2. Scandinavian

   1. White

To get lists like this, just type the list, select the list, click the Numbering icon to turn numbering on, press Tab to indent each item as far as it needs to go, then select the whole list and in the Options tab select the numbering type you want at each level.

However, what do you do if you want this? AND let’s say you have about a hundred  of these and combine them in the same master document?

1. Directive on Parking

   1. Parking shall be completed by 8:30 AM each morning.

   2. Parking shall be performed in the following lots

      1. Lot A, except on Mondays

      2. Lot B

      3. Lot Q on weekends

2. Directive on After-Work Parties

   1. Parties shall follow these guidelines

      1. Parties shall last no longer than three hours

      2. Parties shall be catered for no more than $300

      3. Parties shall provide bus service home as necessary

   2. Parties shall take place no more than five times a year

When I first typed up the Directive on Parking part in OpenOffice, composing the blog before I posted it here, it actually looked like the following: the top-level numbering for the directive on parking continued from the bread list, even though it was totally separate.

Imagine a 100-page document or a 100-document book where you have to go back and fuss and curse over restarting the numbering.

The trouble with using regular ol’ numbering is multi-fold.

There Are  Problems With Trying to Do Complex Numbering in Big Projects, Especially Relating to Restarting Numbering

Restarting the numbering where and when you want it is hit and miss. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t.

To restart numbering, you need to click the Restart Numbering icon, or alternately use the Paragraph formatting window. Here they are.

NOTE however that this restart attribute is NOT available when you create a paragraph style.

This all means that you cannot apply restart-iness with styles. You can only apply it manually.

[I have tested the following issue moderately with 2.1 and it does not SEEM to be a problem. Test with your documents.] Also, here’s the kicker. When you import new styles, at least some of the time, the manual settings, aka the restartiness, are kablooied and you need to set them all over again.

[I have tested the following issue moderately with 2.1 and it does not SEEM to be a problem. Test with your documents.] Did I say the kicker? That was a kicker. There’s another even bigger kicker. Importing the styles also often kablooies all the indenting you did to get, say, Rye bread down to level 3 or the party rules down to the level they’re at. You can get around this by using a separate paragraph style/numbering style combination for every level but you still end up with the problem of manual restarts.

You could consider using outline numbering; however you cannot restart the numbering if you are going to combine multiple documents in a master document. Also you have only the most basic control over the distance from the number to the text. (Tools > Outline Numbering. See also http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/10/in_praise_of_ou.html )

So what the heck is the solution?

There Is A Solution If You’re Willing to Do Things Completely Differently

The solution comes from my colleague Jean Weber, at www.jeanweber.com.  She has an excellent book on Writer, including high-end complex issues like this.

Here’s the link to the OOo doc, to which she contributed. http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/oooauthors2/

Here’s a link to her book on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/OpenOffice-org-Writer-Free-Alternative-Microsoft/dp/0596008260/sr=8-1/qid=1163013762/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0539644-5923228?ie=UTF8&s=books

Here’s a link to the file you’re going to be using to solve this problem. http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/oooauthors2/0214WG-WorkingWithFields.pdf

What you do is, you create a numbering series of your own that has nothing to do with the normal numbering.

I’ll leave the particular details to Jean’s guide; go to the section called Defining your own numbering sequences. Here’s what you need to accomplish.

1. Create a single number range for every level. For instance, if your top level is regular Arabic, your second level is Alphabetic, and your third level is lower Roman, then create a single number range for each of those called Arabic, Alpha, and Roman (or one two and three, or Larry Moe and Curly, or whatever). Choose Insert > Fields > Other, click the Variables tab, choose Number Range on the left, and the rest is pretty clear. Jean's guide provides lots of nice detail for this.

2. Create paragraph styles with the indenting you want, one style for each level. The paragraph styles are what will take care of the indenting. You also need to set up the correct tabs since you’ll press Tab between the number range and the text.

Here are examples for levels 1, 2, and 3. In this formatting example  there’s an indent of .3 inches from the left margin of the document for all text. Also the distance from the number to the text is .3 inches.

Level 1 (plus set a .3 tab in the Tabs tab)

Level 2 (plus set a .3 tab in the Tabs tab)

Level 3 (plus set a .3 tab in the Tabs tab)

3. Start inserting the numbers, just anywhere in the document. You're going to insert them, then make shortcuts so that you can insert them more easily.

Choose Insert > Fields > Other, select your top level variable such as Arabic, specify 1 in the Value field, and click Insert.

Now   create your ArabicContinued field.  Press Return or just make a space or two. Still in the Fields window, delete the 1 from the Value field, and click Insert to insert another field of the same range. It’ll show up in the document as  2. Click Insert again if you want to prove it's working; it'll show up as 3.

DO NOT set up different variables here for the regular and the restart. They need to have the same name.

Do the same for the first item and the next item at all the levels you’re using.

4. Apply the appropriate paragraph styles to each number range you're using. If you created a paragraph style called TopLevelNumbering, apply it to all the Arabic fields (or whatever you're using at the top level). Also press Tab to insert a tab after each number.

5. If you have a lot more work to do, you want all this inserting stuff to be easier so make AutoTexts.

5.a. Select the first top-level numbering item, the Arabic one that equals 1 and the tab. (Not crucial, but as long as you're saving yourself some work, you can make the tab show up automatically, too.) Be sure the appropriate style is applied so that you can bundle the number and the correct style into one convenient autotext.

5.b. Choose Edit > AutoText. Type a name like ArabicRestart, make the shortcut something obvious like AR for ArabicRestart. Click and hold down on the Autotext button and choose New.

5.c. Repeat the steps for the next number at that level, the one that doesn’t have 1 as the value. So select the field that shows 2 in your document, choose  Edit > AutoText,  and call this one just Arabic or ArabicContinued. Make the shortcut something like A or AC.

5.d. Repeat those  steps for every level.

6. Now just keep on formatting or typing your list by inserting numbers. Type AR F3 (the shortcut plus the key that says "insert the autotext with that shortcut" to insert a numeral 1 plus a tab. Type AC F3 to insert a sequential continuous number.   

Note on inserting: You can't have the cursor immediately next to any existing text or the AutoText tool will get confused about what you want to do. There has to be at least a space between the cursor and any other text.

Alternately, if your list already exists, copy and paste the appropriate restart and continuous number variables to the appropriate spots, rather than using the shortcut keys.

In Conclusion

Is it wildly different from normal numbering? Yes. Is it complicated to set up? No more than any other complex numbering.

Does it offer much more reliability and control than other numbering in OpenOffice Writer, for complex lists? Yes, yes, oh god, yes.

---

A Design Contest! Enhancing the OpenOffice.org Template Coffers

The deadline is October 31st! Still plenty of time to enter!

It's another contest! Anyone with OpenOffice.org and a dream (that's all of us, potentially) can enter.

It's the Worldlabel-sponsored OpenOffice.org Design Competition.

" The OpenOffice.org documentation project has announced a Template & Clipart Contest.

The total prize money is to the tune of $5000 sponsored by WorldLabel, which has long been a strong champion of OpenOffice.org.

The goal is to increase the trove of templates and clipart. The current collection of template samples leaves a huge gap that needs to be filled. Step up and fill that gap. Winners will also have the option of including their winning entries in the OpenOffice.org installation sets available from the site.

If you are interested, visit the Documentation Project for more information. Everyone is eligible and everyone is encouraged to participate. The contest officially starts this week and ends 31
October 2006. Winning entries will be judged by a panel of three and winners will be announced."

Enter! I'm definitely going to do it. It's fun, plus with more templates, OpenOffice.org will be even more appealing for those still with Microsoft Office.

---

In Praise of Outline Numbering for OpenOffice Writer Documents

[Note: Here's a template you can use with this, see instructions at end of post.]

You don't really even need to know what this feature is to benefit from it.

For every document, be sure Outline Numbering is set up correctly. You'll get a lot of very cool automatic formatting and content for free.

Outline Numbering is the specification of the structure of your document.  It just means telling OpenOffice which paragraph styles you're using for headings.

Why bother with outline numbering? Because when you have outline numbering set up, you get so much cool stuff for free.

How do you do it and what are these fabulous free things?

Read on.

Step 1: Apply styles to all headings (but you already were, right?)

You must, and should, use paragraph styles with each heading to indicate what type of content, and what level, it is.

Just select your heading text and click in the style dropdown list...

Or choose Format > Styles and Formatting, click the Paragraph Styles icon (far left at the top), then double-click the style name.

Now the selected paragraph style is applied to the text in the selected heading.

It's easy and simple to use the paragraph styles Heading1 through Heading10 for your headings.

If you don't like how the styles look, modify them. Right-click on the style name in the Styles and Formatting window and choose Modify.

Step 2: Check that Outline Numbering is correct (it should be already)

The default structure is Heading1 down through Heading10. Choose Tools > Outline Numbering; it should look like this.

If it doesn't look like this or if you applied different paragraph styles to your headings, then just apply the correct styles to each level.  Select a level on the left, select the appropriate heading style in the dropdown list, and so on.

If you want numbering that is like this, then assign the appropriate numbering at each level.

1. Bread

[content]

1.1 Rye

[content]

Then change the Show Sublevels field; if you want a heading to show 1.1, for instance, you want to show two sublevels.

Then click OK.

Step 3:  Benefits: You get automatic tables of contents, and easy, automatically updated running headers and footers

Now, tables of contents work automatically. Choose Insert > Indexes and Tables > Indexes and Tables. Click OK. TOCs are set up by default based on your outline numbering, assuming it's Heading1 through Heading10.

So with no additional effort at all I get this TOC from the sample I showed earlier. The gray just means that the fields are generated automatically. When you change anything in the document, right-click on the TOC and choose Update.

You also get easy running headers and footers.  Click in a header or footer, Insert > Fields > Other, and click the Document tab. Select Chapter as the Type, Chapter Name as the Format, and the level you want. Layer 1 is the current top level heading text that you used the Heading1 paragraph style on; Layer 2 is the current second-level heading text that you used the Heading2 paragraph styel  and so on.

I inserted Layer 1 on the left and Layer 2 on the right of this footer. Click to see a larger version.  In a few pages when I've got different headings, these footers will change automatically.

See? Outline numbering, and using easy styles for all your headings, gives you a lot of great automatic stuff for  very little effort. And we love getting a lot for a little.

---

Here's a template you can use so that you can have Ctrl 1 through Ctrl 9 associated with heading styles Heading1 through Heading9. Ctrl T is for text body and Ctrl W is for text body indent, also.

Download the template, then set it as your default template. Default Template means that when you choose File > New > Text Document, this template opens automatically.
1. Open it in OpenOffice. It's got some explanatory text in there, so delete that.  Also, optional, if you want to edit how the styles look, just right-click on the text for that style and choose Edit > Paragraph Style.
2. Once you're good with how the template looks, choose File > Templates > Save. Name the template and put it in My Templates category. Click OK.
3. Choose File > Templates > Organize, and in the left-hand column open the My Templates category and find that new template.
4. Right-click on it and choose Set as Default Template.
[to go back to the normal template, right-click anywhere in the left pane and choose Reset Default Template.]

Now when you choose File > New > Text Document, you've got quick keys for all the styles, and you can be really fast applying styles.

---

Using Sections to Reduce Extra Work

I love efficiency.

I hate finding mistakes that I have to correct in a zillion dozen places.

How do I do more of the thing I love and less of what I hate?

Sections!

Sections are great for partitioning off existing text that you've typed and treating it differently: giving it a different background, protecting it from being modified, putting it in columns, etc. Here's a small section in columns.

Another great way to use sections is to use them to access content in a different file.

Let's say you've got boilerplate content that you use in 11 different documents. You could copy and paste it 11 times, but it often changes. And it would SUCK if the content were out of date or inaccurate or just misspelled, in those 11 different documents.

So you type the content once on one document, and insert 11 different sections in 11 other documents. So far it's the same amount of work as copying and pasting.

BUT when the content changes, you change it in the source doc and it updates in those other 11 documents. NOW you're being efficient and avoiding mistakes.

Step 1.  So write your content that you need to reuse, in your source document.

Big Red Chair Consulting is in no way responsible for any problems. Copyright all content September 2006.

Save your source document as legalboilerplate_source.odt, or whatever.

Step 2. Now go to one of the 11 documents where this content needs to show up.

Click where you want the content to appear, and choose Insert > Section. In the Section window, select the Link option. Click the browse button (...) and find the legalboilerplace_source.odt file.  Click Insert.

The content, all of it including blank lines, from the source doc, shows up in the doc where you insert the section.

If you want, in the Section window, you can unmark the Protect option, so that it can be changed, but that's not a good idea. It's best to leave Protect marked, and then also mark With Password. When you select Password, a window will pop up where you enter it twice. Then later if you try to change the content, you'll be prompted to enter that password.

Step 3: When you need to change the content in the source document, just change it.

Then the next time you open one of the 11 docs where you use it, you will be prompted to update links. Choose Yes.

Or if the document is already open, update by choosing Tools > Update > Links.

Either way, the new content will be displayed.

That's all there is to it. Sections are a very useful feature; I encourage using them whenever you can.

---

Columns in OpenOffice Writer: Balancing Columns, and Inserting a Page or Pages With Columns Without Resorting to Page Styles, Updated March 2006

I've talked about page setup before.  Specifically,  how the heck do you have one page set up so that it's got a cover design with no page number, and then the second page and the rest have page numbers, nothing fancy, and start with the page number 1?

The answer for that is here.

But what if your question is this: How do you  insert one or more pages of columns in your document, then switch back to regular layout?

Well, one answer is the same as before. Use page styles, switch between them.

But there's a simpler answer.

Use a section.

A section is a very easy way to set off text to be treated differently. You can give the text a different background, or suck in the content from an entirely different file, and many other options. The section can be one word or a dozen or more pages.

Just click Insert > Section, and you see the options.

Click the Columns tab, select the number of columns, set up spacing, and a separator line if you want.

Click OK. Here's what the empty section will look like.

Type some content in the section. You'll see the content appear in the section.

You can keep on typing in that section for a long time. Make it as many pages as you want. The text can be a little twitchy when typing in a section which is why you might consider the next thing, below.

Turning existing content into columns  You can also simply select a bunch of text that you want in a column, choose Insert > Section, select the Column tab as you did before and apply options, and click OK. Then the selected text will be put into columns without your having to retype or copy and paste it.

But what if your question is this: How do you  balance content in a normal document, that's just got columns all the way through?  How do you balance column content using the Page Format window?

There is, in fact a solution. I got it from Phil's comment. Thanks, Phil!

Hi. I'm just trying to learn Writer and have been experimenting with columns. If you want the 'Distribute evenly..' checkbox to appear before you do any real typing try typing the first word you want that will be in your first column - highlight it (select it) - then go to Format-Columns and the checkbox will be there. Pretty bizarre to me too but someone must have thought it was a good idea at the time :-)

If you just have a blank page, or you have some text with no text selected, and you choose Format > Columns or Format > Page > Columns, there's no option to balance columns.

BUT if you type then select even a small bit of text, then choose Format > Columns or Format > Page > Columns, there IS an option to balance columns.

Make your column selections, such as selecting the number of columns, and the checkbox will become enabled. Click OK and there you go.

The answer is, I don't think you can. Or rather, yet again, ya gotta use sections. Look at this page setup window.

There's no option to balance the columns.

How is it that there's an option to balance content in sections that have columns, but not in pages?
I don't know. I think it's kind of silly.

How do you choose whether to balance or not balance content in sections that have columns?

If you want to use sections to create columns, the balancing option is available there too. Choose Insert > Section, Columns tab. Evenly Distribute Contents to All Columns .

If you don't want balance, unmark it. Then your columnated sections will look like this -- content all the way to the bottom of the page, then restarting in the next column.

How do you  change a section once it's inserted?

Select some of the content in the section, then choose Format > Section. Click the Options button and you'll see everything you need.

 

---

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

Note: See also this blog on just using the offset feature.

Note: This is a repost from December that didn't get published correctly. Also see my post that will be coming Wednesday, on an easier approach if you just want to insert some columns 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.

---

Making It Easy for Your Organization to Work With Microsoft Office Users

One of the issues you face when you switch your organization to OpenOffice.org is: how do the users work with MS Office users?

If Angie down at the courthouse needs a document that your clerk Rob created, how does Rob send Angie what she needs? Especially if Rob isn't very experienced with file formats, attaching documents to emails, and so on?

You do this.
1. Set up everyone's computers to save by default in MS Office format. Then they don't need to even worry about sending Angie the file in the right format.

2. You set up everyone's default email program.

3. You train everyone to send out documents using one of the options under File > Send. You might even create a new toolbar with those options more clearly expressed.

See this blog for info on modifying toolbars/menus in general and this blog, from Monday, on how to add the two new items.

1. Setting Your Default Email Program

I've mentioned it before, but have forgotten about it since blogging ;>  so it bears mentioning again. When you choose File > Send > Document as Email or File > Send > Document as PDF Attachment, the default email program starts. How do you specify it? It's usually not right, for one thing, since Yahoo starts by default on my desktop and (oorgh) Outlook starts on my laptop.

The online help for OpenOffice says to look for the External Programs setting. However, there is no such thing. You set your default program by setting it in your operating system. For me, it's under Internet options in my control panel.

2. Set Up Everyone to Save in MS Office Format

If you work with people who aren't familiar with saving files in different formats, or if you just think it would be easier for you, set up everyone's computers like this.

Tools > Options > Load/Save > General.

In the area toward the bottom, select Text Document, then in the corresponding dropdown list, select the Microsoft Word format. Click the image to see a larger version.

Repeat for each file format in the Document Type list, then click OK to close the window and save changes.

3. Use the File > Send Features As Much As You Can
I love these features. They make working with non-OpenOffice users so much easier. Plus there's a new one this release in 2.0.3 -- too bad they didn't put it on the menu.  ;>  However it's easy to do yourself.  Click the image to see a larger version of the menu options as they are by default.

Document as Email starts your default email program, and attaches a copy of the current document to that email. All the user needs to do is address the email and enter content like "Angie, here's the document you wanted." If you're set up to save in MS formats, then the doc of course is in the appropriate MS format.

Email as PDF does the same thing, but makes a PDF version of the current document, and attaches that to the email.  This is great if Angie down at the courthouse doesn't need to edit the document, or if you realllllly don't want her to.

There are two other new ones, Email as Microsoft Word and Email as OpenDocument Text. See the related blog for how to add those to the menu, or to a menu that you create yourself. You can also of course rename those options to make them clearer for users.

There you go -- those are three steps that will make interacting with MS Office users much simpler. Less training, fewer complications, and less confusion about where various files went.

---

Selecting Non-Consecutive Pieces of Text in OpenOffice Writer

I'm on Bainbridge Island near Seattle this week, training teachers who are switching to OpenOffice.org. (Bill would have charged them many hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next few years to keep going with MS Office, so they decided to spend the money on things like teachers' salaries instead.)

The thing that seems to be a big hit is the ability to select non-consecutive pieces of text. I'm not sure if I've blogged on that before, so this seemed like a good time.

Say you've got this text here.

NOTICE FOR ALL NEW HIRES

Date:

Your date of hire must be April or earlier.

Paperwork:

Your paperwork must be in by May 15th.

Donuts:

Please pick up your donuts in the gym.

You want the text for the heading, plus Date, Paperwork, and Donuts to be bold. These are non-consecutive pieces of text.

You could select the first line, click Bold, select the next line, click Bold, and so on.

Or you could select everything that you want bold, and click Bold once!

Here's what you do.

1. Select the first piece of text that you want to select, just normally.

2. Hold down the Ctrl key.

3. Select each additional piece of text that you want to format.

4. Release the Ctrl key.

5. Click Bold, or select a different font, or whatever other formatting you want to do.

This is a much quicker way than applying the formatting to one piece of text at a time.

---

Some Very Precise Table Control Settings in OpenOffice Writer

If you don't have really specific requirements, you can just insert  a table and drag the columns around to make it spaced the way you want it.

You can also do a lot of good work with the automatic spacing options on the Table toolbar. (View > Toolbars > Table.)

But for good old-fashioned "I want this column to be 2.53 inches wide and I don't care who think's that's anal and geeky" control, you want the Table and Colums tabs of the Table Properties window. (Table > Table Properties.)

Here we go.

So let's say you're not happy with the table just spreading itself all over the whole width of the page. You can drag the right-hand edge if you want or you can be more precise.

Select your table and choose Table > Table Properties. Click the Table tab.

To align at the left, which is the default, select Left. However, to have an indent from left, select From Left.

Then in the Left field, specify how far in from left you want to indent, such as a half inch.

Click OK, and you see the results.

Also in the Table Properties window, if you selected the table and went back in again, you could specify a smaller width for the table in the Width field. The value for how far in from Right the indent is would be recalculated, in the Right field.

Click OK, and you see those results.

The other interesting option in the Table tab, for alignment, is the Manual tab. Select Manual, and  set your indents from the left and right in the Left and Right fields.

You can use the Manual setting in combination with the column measurements in the Column tab. Click the Column tab.

If you leave both the checkmarks unmarked, here's what happens. Just put the measurements that you want for each column in the appropriate field. If these measurements don't add up to the same amounts you set in the Table tab, then the margins will be adjusted and the column widths will remain the same.

Click OK and you see the results.

Let's say that you want the margins to be the same but the table width to be adjusted, under the same circumstances. Then select the Adapt Table Width checkbox, and the margins from the Table tab will remain the same but the column widths you enter here will be goofed around a bit. I find this setting a bit annoying, but try it if the margins are the most important thing.

If you want to still preserve the margins but adjust the widths of the columns proportionately under the same circumstances, select the Adjust Columns Proportionately checkbox. Warning, however. It's not proportionate adjustment. If you have columns of 3, 2, and 1, and you decrease the first column to 2.5, then both of the other columns are decreased by the same amount. This is weird.

That's about it for today's installment of table measurement control. Generally, if you want absolute control, select the Manual option in the Table tab. Then enter your margin measurements in the Table tab and your column measurements in the Columns tab. And don't select either of the wacky checkboxes in that tab.

---

Making OpenOffice.org Work the Way You Want It (Repost)

 

(Originally posted in October 2005.)

Note: Here's a related article I wrote for TechTarget.com.

What's better, software that does what it thinks you want, or software that does what you tell it to?

If it's rocket-launching software, and I don't know much about rocket-launching, I guess I would let the software do what it wants. However, I know what I darn well want my office suite software to do. I know how I want it to behave. I know what features I want and I know, for instance, that I do not want it suggesting to me what word I am typing and offering to help me finish the arduous task of typing it.

OpenOffice.org has its default behavior and default settings just like any other software but is very cooperative in letting you customize those behavior and settings the way you want them. Which is refreshing. You just have to tell it how to behave.

So I've put together a list of the top  customizations I think are the most helpful and/or powerful. I make sure that everyone in my classes learns these by lunchtime, and review them afterwards. When the software behaves the way you want, that makes everything better.

(By the way, this is a little bit off topic, but I wanted to mention that the scroll graphic at the top of this blog is a drawing shape in OOo 2.0.  I'm a bit of a giggly schoolgirl when it comes to the OOo drawing tools, especially the new 2.0 features.)

1. Turn off the word completion.

I hate word completion, and it’s really easy to turn off. Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click on the Word Completion tab. Make sure the Enable Word Completion option is unmarked, and click OK.

2. Turn off any automatic formatting that you don’t want.

Would you let people live in your house who you didn’t know? Then you don’t want automatic formatting going on that you don’t understand. Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click on the Options tab. Unmark everything except the top option, Use Replacement Table. Then go back through and see if you really want anything.

(You can unmark the Use Replacement Table option too....but that table is handy, as you'll see in the next item.)

3. Use the automatic formatting to create handy shortcuts.

The same tab where you turned off word completion has a really great feature for creating shortcuts. Let’s say you type the word supercalfragilisticexpealidocious a zillion times a day, or your name and title, or anything kinda long. You can set up a shortcut for it. It's a much more reliable approach than word completion.

To do this: Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click on the Replace tab.

A. In the left-hand field type your shortcut like sig and in the right-hand field, type the word you’re tired of typing all the time.

B. Click New, then click OK.

C. Click the Options tab and be sure that both checkboxes for the top item, Use Replacement Table, are marked. That just means "use the stuff in the Replace tab."

D.  In your document, type the shortcut, followed by a space, and your word will appear.

Note: You can also delete anything in the Replace tab that you don't want.

4. Display the icons that you want.

There are a zillion icons in OOo as with any software and you probably don’t use all of them. There’s also that dandy little result of having to click on the black arrow to get to the icons you want, while the ones you do want sit there taking up space and, quite frankly, smiling a bit smugly. So take off the ones you don’t want, leave room for the ones you do want, and add some other ones.

First step is to take off the ones you don’t want. Click on the dropdown arrow and choose Visible Buttons. Find the icons you don’t want, like double spacing, and select them. That’ll remove the checkbox by them, and that removes them from the toolbar.

Now add the icons you want. The first thing to try is to click the dropdown arrow again and choose Visible Buttons. If the icon you want is there, select it and it’ll appear.

If the icon you want isn’t there, click on the dropdown arrow again and instead of Visible Buttons, select Customize Toolbar. Find the toolbar you want to add icons to. Click Add, and in the window that appears just keep looking through the categories on the left til you find the feature you want in the list on the right. Select it and click Add.

 

Back in the customization window, you can leave the icon as is and just click OK, or change the icon by clicking and holding down on the Modify button and choosing Icon.

5. Get to know the choices under Tools > Options.

Choose Tools > Options, and you’ll see the big fat configuration window. Just as the items under Tools > Autocorrect were about default behavior, Tools > Options is about default settings, default values. Anything about the program, from icon size to language settings to where the program looks when you choose File > Open, is set here.

I suggest that you open the OpenOffice.org (or StarOffice as in this illutration) item at the top, then select Paths, and change the values for any paths you use a lot. Change the My Documents item, for instance, to change the default for where OOo tries to save documents. You’ll save a lot of time scrolling around in your Save windows.

To change the path, select it in the window, click Edit, and just point to the new location.

You might also want to expand the StarOffice Write item, select Default Fonts, and choose the ones you prefer.

When you’re done, just click OK.

You can turn off the Save for Autorecovery feature if you want--or increase the save interval
I find this feature entirely un-annoying, but you can turn it off easily if you want. Autorecovery means if OpenOffice.org crashes or you have to coldboot your machine, at least you'll have something recent to return to. If you're hypervigilant, increase the interval to every minute or 5; if you don't care about it, set it to every hour or just turn it off.

Choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Load/Save > General. You're looking for the Save AutoRecovery Information Every  option. Unmark it, or change the interval.

Click the thumbnail below to see a bigger image of the window.

Now OOo is more like a well-behaved pet and less likely to jump up at you, licking and biting inappropriately.

Those are not all the configuration steps you can do, by a long shot. But I like them, and students seem to like them. And they're an important set of steps in the general process of showing that OpenOffice.org does what you tell it to do.

---

Some Pretty Slick Web Design Features: Image Map, Web Page Editing, Graphic Design, and Creating Your Own Colors (Repost)

(First posted March 2006)

I know I should probably be using Nvu or just hand coding everything in HTML or using cascading style sheets.

But for those of us who still redesign our web sites on Saturday morning while listening to Car Talk and Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, I wanted to talk about what I did for my site at www.getopenoffice.org. Since it worked out pretty well, to my not-that-artistic mind. At least, it's vaguely pleasant and not Five Bright Colors of the Same Shade. Click to see a bigger version if you like.

I was pretty happy with what I was able to do, how I was able to design the colors, and I'm stoked with the image map. It turned out in a far more normal, controlled way than I usually experience. So for all of you out there who are a little fuzzy on web design but do it anyway, here are some features I think you can use for some pretty decent results.

I'm not here to talk about how FAAAbulous the new design is, but to focus on the steps I used in OpenOffice.org to do it. It's also by no means a lesson on web design—I'm just showing what I was able to do in a morning (OK, a long morning) in OpenOffice.org, and hoping it helps other people.

Features include:

• Creating my own colors
• Cool drawing shapes for nav bar
• Image maps
• Reasonably well-behaved HTML editing in Web documents (HTML purists, just let me go with this ;> )

By the way: I'm sooooo sorry for the bright blue design at www.getopenoffice.org for the past few months. I got the templates from a free templates site and it just didn't work.

Getting the Design

I am in no way a Graphic Designer. So I just went to my friend Kristin Nelson's web site (designed by fabulous friend Takane), www.nelsonagency.com, to get ideas.  I decided there was no way I was going to learn JavaScript before I had to leave that afternoon, but I did like the colors—a deep maroon and a beige. So I stole that. ;>

Side story: Kristin started her  literary agency maybe four years ago, and she lives in Denver, not New York. She's made incredible progress, including selling the film rights to many of the books. If you've got some marketable fiction and you're looking for an agent, consider her.

So, armed with the ideas “maroon!” and “taupe!” and figuring I would just use the same simple top/side navigation style, I continued to the beginnings of implementation.

Creating the Colors

One of the wonderful things about OpenOffice.org is that you can create your own colors. So I chose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Colors, and created my maroon and my taupe. The far right color, and the ones on the bottom, are various colors I created for the site.

I did various shades of maroon, a lighter one for a bit of shadow and contrast, and a few different taupes for the nav area, the text in the nav area (nearly black), and other taupes for shading and for the background color of the page.

To create your own colors:

1. Choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Colors. Click on the Edit button in the colors window. Click the image to see a bigger version if you like.

2. Then mess around in those windows with the various settings til you get what you want.

3. Then click OK, click Add, and name the new color.

Creating the Nav Graphic

I went into OpenOffice.org Draw and after some fiddling with colors and fonts, came up with the navigation graphic, including all the text along the left and top. It's in two separate chunks, for the top and the left side.

I used this beveled rectangle tool to draw the navigation shape at the top, and just used a couple graphics behind each other in different colors for the other shading.

I exported each of the two graphics just by selecting the components of each, choosing File > Export, and exporting to .gif. Other options of course are JPG, PNG, etc.

Creating the Web Page Master

I created a new web page (File > New > HTML Document). I inserted an eight-inch-wide table in the center (well, kind of ;> ) of the document to control where the graphics and text go. The table was two rows and three columns, no heading, with a left column of 2 inches, a middle spacer column of 1 inch, and then the rest. Click to see a bigger image of the setup window here if you like.

Then I merged the top row of cells, where the top nav graphic is going, to end up with something like this.

And I also removed the table borders.

Adding the Graphic to a Document and Additional Formatting

I just chose Insert > From File and added the top graphic in the top merged row, and the left graphic in the left cell. I right-clicked on each graphic and set it to Original Size since there was some wackiness with automatic size reduction.

I also right-clicked on each graphic and choose Anchor > As Character to get rid of extra space below them.

Some extra white space showed at the bottom of the nav bar because of the formatting of the apparently nonchangeable Table Contents paragraph style. However, this wasn't an issue when browsing the document.

I also set the background color of the cells to match the graphic in them; the spacer and right lower cells were set to white since they'll have text and I want a white background.

I made the page background color a lighter taupe. (I chose Format > Page and clicked the Background tab.)

And I set the page size nice and big so that there would be plenty of room for the graphics. Same window, Format > Page and choose the Page tab.

Doing the Image Map: Linking Portions of Each Graphic to the Pages on My Web Site

I right-clicked on the top nav bar graphic and chose Image Map.

In the Image Map window, I used the rectangle tool to draw a box around each piece of text on the graphic that I wanted linked, and entered the URL It's a little odd—you have to draw the box around the image in the window, so it's a little small but manageable.

Then I did the same for the left nav bar.

You end up with nothing happening to the graphic itself, but a bunch of code in the document with the tag MAP1, MAP2, etc. The code gives the coordinates of the links. That means of course that you don't change anything that would shift the graphic up or down or left or right, once you get this done.

The image map would have been too small to see in this window if I had used the full length one here for the editing.  I kind of cheated—I used a short version of the left nav graphic in the beginning, then created a much longer one in Draw and inserted that after the map was done. Since the only thing that changed between the short graphic and the long graphic was the bottom, where there are no links, this didn't affect the image map.

Tweaking

I had to tweak some stuff, of course, in the HTML. No biggie. My graphics seem to end up local sooner or later for no readily apparent reason. I use EvrSoft's 1stPage. I also tweaked a bit in Netscape's Composer since it seems that Web's graphics wrapping features, at least in the GUI, aren't all that great. (Of course, if I bothered to memorize a few more HTML commands, I wouldn't have needed Netscape at all.)

Pasting in the Content

Nothing shocking here. I pasted in the content from my old site, creating a new page with File > Save As.

I adjusted the right margin as I would in normal formatting. (Again, HTML purists, I know it's Wrong but it felt so right.... ;>  )

Posted the pages. Did some retweaking.

That's All.

Heck, I didn't even use the Web Wizard. (File > Wizards > Web Wizard.) That tool of course is more for quick “just get it on the web” work when you have a lot of existing content to slam up on the web.

So....who should be using these tools versus Nvu, DreamWeaver, handcoding, better overall extensible design, etc.--well, I'm not debating any of those issues. Just wanted to show you what was available, and let you know you might be surprised at how much cool stuff you can do without a huge headache.

---

---

TechTarget Article: Lists, Simple/Easy and Complex/Powerful, in OpenOffice Writer

I've written a nice long article on lists for TechTarget.com.

It covers a bunch of topics:
- simple lists
- using the extreeeemely helpful list toolbar
- what you need to know about styles to use the really powerful list features
- the really powerful list features

Here's a kind of list you can create with the power features.

---

Doing Calculations in Tables, in OpenOffice Writer (Repost)

(First posted February 2006)

Doing calculations in tables is a nice feature of OpenOffice.org Writer. You can essentially treat a table like a spreadsheet. With this example, for instance, I can just use spreadsheet-like calculations in the table to get the totals and differences.

The process is a bit different in 2.0 so I'm blogging it here; plus anyone who hasn't used the feature before can see if they like it.

Note: I personally prefer to use spreadsheets, so I would do the calculations in a spreadsheet and then just copy and paste. But for those who like tables, here's how you do it.

This process focuses on summing, with some other options.

First, of course, create the table the way you want it.

Then click in the empty cell where you want a calculation. Choose Table > Formula or press F2 and you'll get the spreadsheet-like toolbar with the formula entry field.

If you know what you want and just want to go right ahead and do it, just type what you want using <> around each cell reference. <F5>, <A1>, etc.

If you want some help from the system, do it this way. Select the cells you want to calculate; you'll get an addition formula by default. This will sum the contents of the selected cell range.

If it's what you want, press Enter or click the green arrow by the formula field. The total will appear.

If it isn't what you want, just retype the formula in the formula field. Be sure to preserve the syntax with the <> around each cell reference. Cell references are the same as Calc, with A1 being the upper left cell of a table and counting across to B and down to 2, and so on. A correct subtraction formula for instance is =<b2>-<c2>

In the following example, I of course want to find the difference, not the sum, of the expenses and income, so I changed the formula.

If you want something more complicated than addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, click on the formula dropdown list.

To format the cells automatically with dollar signs, etc.. select the cells, right click, and choose Number Format. In the window that appears, select the format you want. Click the following image to see a larger image of the window, if you want.

 

Overall, the table formulas work but they're just a bit twitchy. If you've got something beyond simple math, I suggest doing it in a spreadsheet, then copying and pasting the spreadsheet into Writer.

---

---

Tags: OpenOffice.org  openoffice  OpenOffice.org training  openoffice training  open source  open source training  StarOffice  Linux   tagtest   education  Google  Sun 

Manually Controlling What's In Your Labels, in OpenOffice Writer (Repost)

(First posted February 2006)

I received this question from Chris in relation to the blog on labels.

“Is there a way to tell OpenOffice to save the document in such a way as that it essentially "exports" it to another OpenOffice document that isn't attached to the data source, so that you can hand-edit the labels? The only way I found to do it was to save it as a Word document and then re-save _that_ as a standard OOo text document. Is there a more direct way?

Thanks,

Chris”

Good question. There are a few different things you can do.

Change the Label Display So You Can See the Data, Then Edit

I don't know of a way to separate the label data from the data source in a sensible way. However, you can just change the content.

Create the labels, connected to the data source, like you normally do. Don't click the Synchronize option in the third tab.

Choose View > Data Sources.

Click the Data to Fields icon in the toolbar above the data sources.

You'll see content in the labels instead of field placeholders.

Now just edit each field normally. Change Bob to Gretchen, Fargo to Kalispell, etc, just by typing.

When you print, you'll get a conglomeration of the database data and what you typed.

Change the Data Source, Not the Labels

If you want to edit the labels, edit where the information comes from, if that's an option. If your data source is a spreadsheet, just edit the contents of the spreadsheet. Be sure that the .odb database file, and any label documents accessing the database, are all closed when you edit the data itself.

Just Make Labels That You Type the Content Into

This approach is entirely manual, but you can copy and paste into the labels. If you want control over what' s in there, just make blank labels and type.

Choose File > New > Labels. Do everything pretty much the same way, i.e. pick the right label type. But don't put any data or fields in the big empty data box in the first tab, and in the third tab don't click Synchronize. Click New Document. (Click this image to see a bigger version if you want.)

Then just type whatever you want in any of the frames.

Quickly Go From One Label to Another

The labels are in frames, which is a bit of a pain. To quickly go from one to another using the keyboard, press Esc Tab  Enter. (Intuitive, huh?) You can also choose Tools > Customize, click Keyboard, and set up a control key for going between frames.

 

---

Tags

OpenOffice.org    open office    OpenOffice.org training    open office training   open source   open source training   Office 12  Linux   Ubuntu   education   Microsoft Office  labels  mail merge    printing  

---

Mail Merge OpenOffice Labels, OpenOffice.org 2.0 (Repost)

Here's how to do labels.

First, get your data in a spreadsheet, text file, address book, and create a database. You can do this by choosing File > New > Database. 

This post contains instructions for spreadsheets.

This post contains instructions in step 2 for spreadsheets or text files.

Then, once you've got the database set up in OpenOffice.org, you're ready to go.

1. Choose File > New > Labels. (To do Envelopes, open an OpenOffice.org Writer document, and choose Insert > Envelope.)

2. In the Labels tab of the Labels window, select the database  you created in the Database dropdown list. You're looking for the name of the database you created by choosing File > New > Database, not the spreadheet, addressbook, or text file containing the data.

(Click the picture to see a larger image.)

3. Select a table from the Table list. This will be Sheet1 or whatever the sheet name is, if you are using a spreadsheet to hold your data.

4. Select the first field you want to use from the Database Field list.

5. Click the arrow next to it to insert it in the Label Text field.

Type a space after the field and you can add the next field, such as LastName.

6. Use the Database Field list to insert any other fields you need. If you want fields on the second line, click after the last character of the last field you inserted, in the big text box, and just press Enter. If you need to change the arrangement later in the created label document, you can.

7. In the Brand dropdown list, select Avery Letter Size if you're not using A4.

8. In the Type dropdown list, scroll through the billions of labels. Select the type of label you're using, 8160 Inkjet Address is a good one but just use whatever is on the envelope of labels.

9. This step and step 10 , and step 15, are optional but recommended. Click the Options tab.

10. Select the Synchronize Contents option IF you want to apply formatting, like a different font or colors or adding graphics, and make those changes apply to all of your labels.

11.Click the Setup button next to the printer display.

12. Select the printer you want to print to.

13. In the printer options (this will vary according to your operating system) specify the appropriate paper feed or tray. For now, select Manual Feed.

14. Click the New Document button at the bottom of the window. The labels will appear. This is how it's supposed to look. You won't see the data, you'll see the field names like first name. When you print, the correct data will appear.

15. OPTIONAL: IF YOU SELECTED THE SYNCHRONIZE CONTENTS CHECKBOX

If you need to make changes, like adding spaces, rearranging fields, or changing formatting, do so in the upper left label. Make the text an interesting font, or make it the size you need. You can also right-click on the border of the upper right label, choose Frame, go to the Border tab, and give it a background color.

Then click Synchronize to apply those changes to all labels.

16. Choose File > Print. A message will ask if you want to print a form letter. Click Yes.

17. If you want to print labels for only certain records, you can select them in the scrolling list of records. Select one, press Ctrl, select the next, and so on. Or you can select a range of records like 1-20.

18. If you want to just print all the labels, choose All.

19. When you're ready, just click OK. You'll be prompted again to choose your printer. Print normally.

Note: If you have any problems printing, check your printer setup using your operating system setup tools.

Note: You can save the label document and just go back to it again when you need to use it again.

---

---

Breaking Up Is Not Hard to Do (Just Like Getting Back Together) With OpenOffice Writer Tables

   

Splitting Up
If you've tried to insert a page break in a table, you might have gotten a little frustrated.

A normal page break  just jumps the table to the next page.

You can let the table naturally split over pages (Under Table > Table Properties, Text Flow tab, there's a check box for this and it's the default setting.)

If you want more control over where the split is, here's what to do. You actually split the table first, then insert a page break.

1. Click where you want the page break to be.
2. Choose Table > Split Table.
3. You'll see this window.

4. Select how to split.

• Select Copy Heading to repeat the heading without changing it.
• Select Custom Heading (Apply Style)  if you want a heading but a different one. The new blank row that's inserted for your heading has the same paragraph style as the first row in the original table. You usually want this one.
• Select the other Custom Heading if you want a heading with different content, and a different paragraph style.
• For no heading, select No Heading.

5. Click OK.
6. Now insert the page break above the second table (Insert > Manual Break, select Page, click OK).

Note: Be careful about splitting tables containing formulas.

Getting Back Together

What if you want to get the tables back together and it's too late to Undo?

1. Select all the rows in the second table and copy them.
2. Go to the bottom of the first table.
3. Make a new blank row. (Click in the bottom row and choose Table > Insert > Rows, or click the Insert Row icon.)

4. Click in the first cell of the new blank row.
5. Just paste.
6. Delete the second row. (Or if you're feeling confident, in step 1 you could have just Cut instead of Copying.)

---

Think PDF and Links! OpenOffice.org Might Be Your One-Stop Shop for Documents You Distribute (Repost)

Note: This blog has two related posts, on PDF in general and on Impress and links. Originally posted January 2006.

 

I'm going to make a bold statement. If you ever put any documents on the web, you might need only one application in your life: OpenOffice.org.

I'm not talking web design—I'm just saying, if you work for the city government and need to post long pages of forms for people to download, or if you need to publish reports that people can easily find their way around in, or if you're a technical writer and create user manuals with the usual thousands of links within the document and to other documents—you might be good to go with only OpenOffice.org.

What Makes Me Think OpenOffice.org Is Such a Great Publishing Tool?

This is because of three things.

1. In OpenOffice.org, you can create links. You can just type "Click here to go to the web page," select some text, and link it to any web site you want.

You can link any text or graphic to any heading, graphic, table, etc. within your document or within another OpenOffice.org document. (You can link to another PDF document, but not to another bookmark within a PDF document.)

You can automatically generate a linked table of contents, so that anyone clicking on an item in the TOC is taken directly to that heading in the document.

You can put links in headers and footers. Have a link that says "Back to top" that appears in your footer, and you've got great navigation.

2. You can make a PDF document from your OpenOffice.org document. From a Writer text document, Calc spreadsheet, Impress presentation, or Draw drawing, with OpenOffice.org. Just choose File > Export as PDF. Or even easier, just click the PDF icon on your Standard toolbar.

3. In OpenOffice.org 2.0, the links you make in OpenOffice.org transfer over to and work in the PDF.

These are all very important and useful. Put'em together and you have huge power.

What You Need to Do in Your OpenOffice.org Document

Take a look. Here's a document I made using only OpenOffice.org, created the linked TOC automatically and the links between sections manually using only OpenOffice.org, and generated the PDF using only OpenOffice.org. Here's what I did in the document--I didn't do a huge amount of cross-references but I did do enough to demonstrate the power, I hope.

A. There's a table of contents that I generated automatically, and made hotlinked to each section, automatically. Click on a link in the TOC and it goes.

To create a hotlinked table of contents, in your Writer document choose Insert > Indexes and Tables  > Indexes and Tables. To make the hotlinks, click the Entries tab of the window, click to the left of the E and click Hyperlink, and click after the E and click Hyperlink again. Click All to put hyperlinks on all levels of the TOC. Click OK.

Click this image to see a larger version.

B. At the fine, innovative suggestion of Dave Richards of the City of Largo, I put a link in the footer that says “back to top.” This text is linked to the Table of Contents heading so that clicking that link in the footer takes you to the table of contents.  You could also add footers that say and link to "back to whatever you want." You could add headers and link them back to the original Head1. You could add a manual link at the end of any major or minor section to go back to the beginning of that heading.

To turn on the footer, choose Format > Page, click the Footer tab, mark the Footer checkbox, click OK. Then click in the footer text box that appears and click OK.

Click this image to see a larger image if you want.

Type the text you want in the footer text box.

How the heck do you make the link now that you're in the footer or header? That's next. To link an item in a header, footer, or anything else, see the next point.

C. I added links at the beginning, and to any interesting web sites, throughout the document, using the Hyperlink icon on the Standard toolbar.  Links such as "This section covers the following topics" with a bulleted list containing three links.

      Click this image to see a larger image if you want.

  Here's how to create a manual link to a web site, other point in the document, etc. Select the text that you want linked. Click the Hyperlink icon on the Standard (top) toolbar.

In the window that appears, think about what kind of link you want to make. To link to a web site, just click the Internet icon on the left, and type the URL. Click Apply.

To link within the document, click the Document icon on the left side. Then click the round stopsign type icon by the Target in Document field, and you get the navigator. In the navigator window, you can link to any heading, table, object, etc. in your document, or in any other document.

Click this image to see a bigger image if you want.

Note: You'll see that Headings, the TOC, and also other objects like tables and bookmarks show up. You can link to any of them.

• Headings are anything to which you have applied Heading1 paragraph style through Heading10 paragraph style. More specifically, it's whatever is set as the headings under Tools > Outline Numbering.
  
• You can click anywhere and insert a bookmark by choosing Insert > Bookmark and naming it. Then all those bookmarks automatically show up in the Navigator list and you can link to them.

Select the item to link to.

Click Apply.

Click Close.

Once you're back in the Hyperlink window, click Apply again. The same text, a little technical looking, will show up in the Text field at the bottom of the page. This is the text that will appear in the document.

If you want something different to appear in your document, just retype it and click Apply

Then click Close. You'll see the text in the document, linked to the item you selected.

With those three attributes, you can make a document that's extremely useful.

Exporting to PDF

The final step, once you do all this in OpenOffice.org, is to export to PDF.

Choose File > Export to PDF. Name the file. In the PDF options window, specify a page range if you want, and make any changes to the graphics quality. (If you can, keep the JPG compression as high as possible.) Then click Export.

Here's the PDF Options window.Click it to see a larger version if you want. BE SURE TO SELECT THE "TAGGED PDF" OPTION to make the links convert to links in the PDF document.

Click Export, name the document, and you're done.

Take that PDF copy of your document and post it to your web site, email it to whoever needs it, or just do whatever needs to be done to distribute it to the folks who need it.

Think Links and Think PDF! It reduces repetitive work, gives you and your organization extra powers, and will make you look very cool when you introduce this slick, labor-saving approach to distributing documents.

---

Useful Variables in OpenOffice Writer

(New! Not a repost! ;> )

I was watching some Strongbad Email and laughing very hard, when I realized that this was fun for me, but not that useful for someone looking for cool stuff to do with OpenOffice.org

Here's a little something that can be very helpful for anyone with a lot of documents, a lot of people who use those documents, and a strong urge to actually keep track of all those documents.

Bring up the document field variables and you'll see what I mean. Choose Insert > Fields > Other and click on the Document tab.

A host of useful tracking info awaits you.  Here are a few examples.

- Select the Templates option in the Type list and insert the template name, preferably the full path, in the document. Then the template that the document is based on will be displayed. (If the document wasn't based on a template, nothing shows up.)

- Select the File Name option in the Type list and use the option that you like the best. Again, I prefer the full path with file name.

Here's what a document looks like with those pieces of information inserted. Click the image to see it bigger if you want; the inserted fields are at the bottom.

Another approach is using the statistics variables. In the same tab, select the Statistics option in the Type list.

You can insert all sorts of information about the document so it's always there. I'd recommend Arabic in the Format list. The data is updated when you save, reopen, or choose Tools > Update.

Here's an example of what some inserted statistics look like. I typed the words after each; when you click Insert you only get the number. Click the image to see it bigger; the inserted fields are at the bottom.

You can insert any of these variables in the header or footer of your documents, as well, if that's where you like the info.

 

 

---

If You're Not Using PDF With OpenOffice.org....It Will Make You Happier Than You Thought Possible (Repost)

Note: This blog has two related posts, on PDF and links and on PDF and Impress presentations.  Originally published January 2006.

If you're not using PDF with OpenOffice.org now, or if you don't use PDF period, please read this. It's going to make your life so much easier.

PDF Is the International Document Language

Everyone doesn't have the same software. Some people are on Microsoft Office 95. Some people are on WordPerfect. Some are on Microsoft Office 2003. Some are on OpenOffice.org. Some are on NeoOffice, AbiWord, LaTeX, etc. Some people use Framemaker. Some use Quark, Publisher, InDesign,and other page layout programs. And don't even get me started on the different platforms.

What about printing companies? Does Kinko's or Colt Reproduction or your friendly neighborhood printer have your exact software, platform, and version? Probably not.

So when you have to send your annual report, or your resume, or your new novel, or the forms everyone in the city needs to fill out, to someone else to read or print.....sending it to them in the format of your own office suite, however common it might be, probably isn't a good idea. And the more people who have to download or receive your document, the less likely they'll all have the right software to read your document, if you send it to them in the format of the software you used to write it.

That's what Adobe thought when they came out with the Adobe Reader and the document format called PDF. Portable Document Format. When you have the Adobe Reader program on your computer, you can read any document in the Adobe PDF format. It's like the Esperanto of document formats, but good. Everyone uses it. Every computer in the universe, with the exception of maybe five or six, has the Adobe Reader software, so everyone can read any document in the Adobe PDF format. The Adobe Reader program is absolutely free, too. If you happen to not have it, you can go to www.adobe.com/reader and download it.

Making a PDF Version Of Your Document

OK, but how do you make a PDF? You've got your meetingminutes.odt or annualreport.doc file. How do you make it all PDF-y so that everyone can read it in this Adobe PDF format?

Well, in OpenOffice.org you just click the PDF icon on your toolbar. Name the new PDF copy in the window that comes up and save it. That's all. Click, type, click. You can now send your document to anyone in the world with a computer and they can read it.  Here's a document in OpenOffice.org (right-click on the link and choose Save Target As) Writer and the version I made in PDF.

You can also choose File > Export as PDF. That way you get more control as in Distiller. Be sure to select the Tagged PDF option if you want any links in the doc to be links in the PDF.

How You'd Have to Create PDF in Other Applications
If you're using another office suite or layout application, it's more involved to create a PDF. You can buy the Distiller program from Adobe for several hundred dollars if you want a really advanced program for creating PDFs. If you're using Microsoft Word, or anything else from Microsoft, you don't have the built-in capability to just click and make a PDF.

PDF Is Important. OpenOffice.org Has It: Free and Built-In

OpenOffice.org has something that's very important for working with other people. Microsoft (and most other applications) doesn't. What's up with that?

Well, that's for the industry-watching bloggers to answer. My point here is:

• PDF is important and a huge timesaver if you ever have to give your documents to other people.

• Making PDF is built into OpenOffice.org, and it's incredibly easy.

• Working with a professional printer is so much better with PDF. Sometimes it's the only way. If you need to print 200 copies of your report, spreadsheet, presentation, or any other document, it's much easier to make a PDF of it and upload it to www.kinkos.com, than to take a hardcopy down there. If you're writing a novel and want to self-publish it, it's easy to make a PDF and any printer can crank out copies.

Here's a note. The PDF document you create is not editable. If you need to send your report.ods to someone else who will make final changes to it, you'll need to send the file format they use. Choose File > Save As and pick a format in the type list. But you know what? Even people who ask for a .doc format all the frickin' time don't really need to edit the document you're sending them. They just don't know about PDF. PDF rocks.

That's why PDF is important, and how to do it.

• If you want to read about links and PDF, which takes the whole PDF/document distribution thing to an even higher level in OpenOffice.org, see this blog.
• To read some tips on using Adobe PDF format and presentations, see this blog.

---

Pasting OpenOffice Calc Spreadsheets Into Writer, as Tables

Alexander Kjerulf (http://www.positivesharing.com ) wrote to me with an excellent question.

How do you get a spreadsheet into a Writer document?

The question is interesting, since it's not really that it's hard—there are just so many ways and many possible results. It's kind of like asking “How do you make a really great vinaigrette?” or “What is the best episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?” There is no one right answer

Here are some answers, then. My birthday is coming up, so let's say that I'm planning my ideal birthday weekend and I did it in a spreadsheet first.

However, let's say that I've had the brilliant thought that I should leave it lying around where my boyfriend is sure to see it, so that he can help facilitate some of these items. In this case, I would like it to be in a regular document, with a nice heading across the top.

In short, I want to take some content from a spreadsheet, and turn it into a table.  I'm going to paste.  But which of the many pasting approaches is best?

Just Pasting the Spreadsheet Normally

Copy the cells from the spreadsheet that you want, switch to a Writer document, and paste.

You get a thingamajig that is kind of a table. Note the table icons in the toolbar. However, you can't really use them except to do things like wrap text around the table or apply other properties to the table object.

Pasting normally gives you kind of a table object with a table look

Double-click in any of the cells so that you can select the text and the cells and basically do normal things to it. But when you do this, iit magiliciously turns into a spreadsheet, with spreadsheet icons. You don't have the table icons anymore.

Double-clicking a pasted spreadsheet gives you spreadsheet tools and a temporary spreadsheet look

This could be quite useful if the spreadsheet were chock full of numbers. However, since it's just full of Wonderful Birthday Ideas, I don't really need it to act like a spreadsheet.

The quest for the perfect way to paste this into a Writer document continues.

Exploring the Paste Special Options

When you choose Edit > Paste Special, or click and hold down on the Paste icon in the main toolbar, you get extra pasting options.

You probably won't use the metafile or bitmap that much, since they create graphics. And the calc8 option just does exactly the same thing as normal pasting. However, the rest are quite useful.

Using the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) Paste Special Option

As you might guess, using this option pastes an HTML table version of your spreadsheet. This is pretty slick if you are, for instance, creating a web page. And it's a table, so of course you get the table tools. Not just when you click on the table but when you click in the cells or select the text.

Using the DDE Link Paste Special Option

This is a very slick pasting option—it's one of the two I recommend. You get a Writer table version of the spreadsheet content, but it's linked to the original spreadsheet. When the original spreadsheet changes, this copy of it changes, too. Of course, you have full use of the table icons.

Consider this option even if you don't want the link because you retain any border formatting or background shading.

This is also nice since, as you might have noticed, the alignment was corrected. In the spreadsheet the alignment by default was at the bottom of the cell. Now, it's at the top. If this isn't what you want then it's a disadvantage, but it's what I want in this instance.

Using the Unformatted Text Paste Special Option

When it says unformatted, it means unformatted.

However, what you can do with this, if you want, is to re-convert it to a table using the instructions here.

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/06/converting_text.html

It's a bit of extra work since you can also use the DDE Link or Formatted Text options to get a regular table.

Using the Formatted Text (RTF) Paste Special Option

This is the other one I recommend. You get a plain old table, in normal Writer format, that's not linked to the original spreadsheet. With the table icons. However, you do lose any formatting associated with the borders or background shading that you might have had in the spreadsheet.

---

Sorting Information in OpenOffice Writer Tables

 

A table of ten or so rows is easy to find information in.

A table of ten pages—that's harder.

To make things easier on yourself, you might want to sort the information. Here's how to do it. (This procedure actually kind of works with regular lists, but not very well. Tables are better.)

Here's the table I'll use as an example. (Imagine it's incredibly long, so that the time we'll save and convenience provided will be immense.)

Select the table, including the headings.

Choose Table > Sort. You'll see this window. It looks really techy and complicated, which it is, but I'll point out the really important stuff.

This part is very important. Be sure that you select Row where indicated. This means that it is the rows of information that will be re-ordered. However, you're sorting by a particular column, like the Name or Postal Code column, and Column will show up elsewhere in the window where you do the actual sorting. It's kinda stupid and complicated, but you'll get used to it.

Now you select the column to sort by. Leave Key1 selected, then specify the column you want to sort by (might be Firstname, but you just select the number). Also select the type of data, Alphanumeric or Numeric. If you're sorting by numbers, you MUST select Numeric. Then select the order: Ascending (A-Z, 1-9) or Descending (Z-A, 9-1).

Click this image to see it a bit bigger.

If you want to sort by two columns, such as by state and then by last name, for instance, then you'll want to use the Key 2 options. For Key 2, select the column to sort by, the type of data, and the order, Ascending or Descending.

Click OK.

There you are, all sorted.

 

---

Finding and Replacing Paragraph Returns and Tabs (Repost)

(Originally published December 2005)

John V and Gabor at the OpenOffice.org Forum helped me find this solution.  See also this blog on bringing text files into spreadsheets.

Call them carriage returns, line breaks, paragraph marks, whatever, sometimes you want fewer of them. Maybe you've brought in some ASCII text that had a line break or two after every paragraph and now with formatted text you don't need it. Or you're turning a spreadsheet or database into text or vice versa.

At any rate, it would be nice to use the Find and Replace window to quickly find'em and change them to whatever you want: nothing at all, or the phrase "el elegante" or whatever.

Note: If you're a macro kind of person, see this page on the ooo forum.

Searching and Replacing, Step by Step

In your OpenOffice.org document, choose Edit > Find and Replace or press Ctrl F. The Find and Replace window will appear.

In the Find and Replace window, enter the symbol for what you want to search for, in the Find field. Here's a quick reference to the symbols to enter for what you're looking for.

• Regular carriage returns  are $
• Soft returns inserted with a Shift Return, are \n
• Just an empty paragraph, i.e. a carriage return but with no text on that line, is ^$
• Tabs are \t

In the Replace field, you typically don't enter anything since you're probably just trying to get rid of whatever you're searching for.

• If you want to replace something with a carriage return, put \n in the Replace field.
• If you want to replace one carriage return with two, put \n\n in the Replace field.
• One thing--you can't replace something with soft returns. As you see, a \n in the Replace field turns into a normal hard return.
• Just use \t normally, in both the Search and the Replace fields, for a tab.

Once your Find and Replace fields contain what they should, click the More Options button. Select the Regular Expressions checkbox. This will make the program look for what those codes represent, rather than literally those characters.

If you're using a mix of regular expressions and normal characters, you might need to use a \ in front of anything you want evaluated normally. For instance, if you really are looking for the symbol $ but you want to replace it with a carriage return \n, then you need to actually search for \$ in the Search field and replace it with \n because $ is a special character.

This illustration shows you're looking for a carriage return (any carriage return), and you're going to replace it with nothing.

Click Find. The first instance (from where the cursor was) of the thing you're looking for will be highlighted.

Click Replace to do the replacing.

And so on. Keep going until you're done. Use Replace All only when you're absolutely positive you'll get the results you want.

---

Is OpenOffice the Right Tool for Techwriters and Book Production? (Repost)

   

Originally published in fall 2005.

Note: See also this article by Bruce Byfield.
http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/magazine/technical/replaceframewithwriter.html

OpenOffice.org as a Techwriter's Tool for Making Books
Let's get this out of the way up front. I use Framemaker for all my OpenOffice.org workbooks and books. It's just a better tool for books than both OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Word. Framemaker has conditional text, extraordinary cross-referencing and numbering tools, solid, reliable layout features, conditional text (which I use extensively), and much more.

So if you're using Framemaker now, you like it and understand it, you use a lot of cross-references, and you do books of even moderate complexity, I say to you, don't be an open source hero. Stick with Framemaker.

If you're not sure whether you need Framemaker, read on and see what you think.

If you're on Microsoft Word, the page flow, random application of styles you never created, and cross-reference truncation has got to be driving you crazy, so I invite you to read on, as well.

(If you're interested in a full workbook about these topics, see the Professional Techwriter workbook here. )

OpenOffice.org Professional Book Production Strengths

Styles rock. They have immense power for just all the things you'd expect from styles, as well as the sequence in which page styles (master pages in Frame) are used.

Styles in general. Styles are really well implemented in OpenOffice.org. You choose Format > Styles and Formatting, you pick what kind of style to create, and you go nuts. Use styles in a standard, consistent manner and you won't go wrong.

Page styles: To specify the layout such as type of headers and footers, margins, backgrounds, etc., you use page styles. You create them the same way you'd create a paragraph or character style. Page styles are pretty solid. You apply them by double-clicking the page style in the stylist, then switching from one page style to another with a manual break or one of two automatic approaches. You can also restart page numbering with all three ways.

Switching page styles: As mentioned, you can switch from one page style to another by inserting a manual break, or automatically. One way is to set up a paragraph style like Heading1 to always start at the top of a new page, with a particular page style. (Framemaker doesn't have this.)  For instance, if you always start a new section with the paragraph style Heading1 and use the page style FirstPage, then you can make that happen automatically and never think about applying page styles.

You can also set up a page style to be applied once, then automatically switch to another page style. Just as you might set up Heading1 to automatically switch to BodyText as the next paragraph style, you can set up FirstPage to automatically switch to LeftRight as the next page style.

Automatic PDF: If your department is on a budget, don't worry about purchasing high-priced copies of Adobe Distiller. You can make PDFs of your documents automatically. Just choose File > Export as PDF, name the file, and set your options.

Master documents: Master documents are the equivalent of master files and book files. They work. They're not slick and powerful, but they work. They also don't crash and corrupt the subdocuments. They're just a bit tricky; you have to do them the right way. You have to insert a Text Item component between each subdocument in order to be able to apply formatting to the subdocuments, but it's not hard to do. To create a master document, just choose File > New > Master Document and use the tools in the window to add files, TOCs, text items, etc.

Automatic captions: You can set up OpenOffice.org to automatically insert captions for all your graphics, tables, etc. They're numbered separately and you can have whatever word you want in front of the caption: Table, Object, Item, Illustration, etc. Choose Tools > Options > Writer > AutoCaption.

Tables of contents: Tables of contents are in generally pretty good. They're linked to the headings you set up in outline numbering (see Weaknesses) and tabs are included by default. I would say they're just as powerful as Frame but easier to set up. You have a lot of formatting power through styles.

Better drawing tools: It's not hard to beat the drawing tools in Framemaker, but OpenOffice.org does it by a mile. Use a frame (Insert > Frame) to group the items, or else just choose File > New > Drawing and make a separate diagram. Then copy and paste into a frame in Writer or export the drawing to a JPG or other format. If you do flow charts or diagrams, the connector line tools alone might be worth using Writer as your book production tool. (Or alternately use Draw to create diagrams that you export to GIF and import into Framemaker.)

OpenOffice.org Professional Book Production Weaknesses

Cross references: Generally, they're solid if not all that slick to implement. However, two issues. One, there's no way, as in Framemaker, to search for broken cross-references, though the cross reference does show up as an empty gray box. Sometimes it's not even an empty gray box, it looks fine. So that's a big issue.

Also, if you want to do cross-references between subdocuments in a master document, you can't select them from a list—you have to keep track of what they are and type the name of the reference in manually. AND the cross-reference doesn't show up correctly in the individual document, it's just a blank gray box. You can see it correctly only from the master document, which is read-only. Grr.

Outline numbering: Outline numbering is actually kind of a powerful tool, and not that tough to implement. Outline numbering is how you tell the program that ChapterTitle is your top-level paragraph heading style, Heading1 is the next level down, and so on. From that you get running headers and footers, automatic chapter numbering, etc. You can also have only one paragraph style at each level, so there goes the idea of having two paragraph styles, Heading1NewPage and Heading1.

Indexes: Indexes work, but they're a little weird and it takes a while to get used to how they work.

Chapter-page numbering: You can set up chapter-page numbering, such as 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 2-1, and so on. You can apply chapter-page numbering to captions. You can have the chapter number in headers and footers. (Once you've set up outline numbering.) However, you can't have it show up correctly in the table of contents for the second level heading on down. Thus, you can either forego tables of contents, forego detailed tables of contents, or forego chapter-page numbering.

Running headers and footers: Running headers are easy, once you've set up outline numbering. Just go to the header or footer and choose Insert > Fields > Other, select the Document tab, select Type column, select the Chapter item, and choose what kind of information you want to insert. “Chapter” just means section, and you can specify what level section with the Layer field in the lower right corner.

There's just one problem. The running header or footer reflects the most recent heading. If you're writing about French Bread on page 1, and have a section title about Rye Bread halfway down the page on page 2, then the running header at the top of page 2 will be French Bread. It doesn't see anything on the current page, only what has already appeared in the document. If you had a running footer on page 2, it would show Rye Bread because by then Rye Bread would have appeared in the document.

This is an issue only with heading level 2 on down, since usually your top level heading will start at the top of a new page or document so quick switches aren't an issue. Therefore you can use only running headers for your top-level heading; you can use them for any levels but only in the footer, or you can use a separate page style for every chapter and type in all your headers and footers manually. The first and second are the best options.

Variables: Let's say you're putting together a huge document for a proposal, and the value like Contractor and Price and ContractorIDNumber appear several places throughout the book. Or you're doing a book for three different products and you want to be able to easily change the product name from BadgersRUs to MarmotMania. In Framemaker and in OpenOffice.org you can create variables to handle this. However, you can't share them across documents in OpenOffice.org, even if they're part of the same master document. You can't import them from one doc to another or from one doc to all other docs in a master document. You can do that in Framemaker.

In Conclusion...

Use styles. Use page styles. Take advantage of automatic page style application/switching. Set up outline numbering. Be flexible with your formatting requirements (notably with running headers and footers, and chapter-page numbering). Be very structured with the titles of your cross-references. Don't expect Framemaker. Do some test documents.

If all that sounds good, then OpenOffice.org could be a good tool for you and your group.

---

---

Quick and Easy Automatic Numeric Formatting in OpenOffice Writer Tables

One of the great principles of information production is:

Separation of Content and Presentation

The more separate they are, the more you can change one without affecting the other. And the more you can make changes fast.

You already know how to do this. Styles are one example. Another is the automatic number formatting you can apply in spreadsheets. Typically this is for numbers that express dates, dollars, percentages, etc. Here's the spreadsheet with no formatting, and below with automatic currency formatting.

You might not know yet, however, that you have the same abilities with numbers in Writer tables. Here's the same information in a table.

To quickly apply or change the number formatting, select the cell or cells, right-click, and choose Number Format.

In the window that appears, select the format you want. First select the Category, then the Format. You can fiddle around with the options below the lists, including number of decimal places.

Click OK, and you've got the formatting. If you change your mind later and want different formatting, it's easy to change; just repeat this procedure and pick different options.

---

Converting Text to Tables in OpenOffice Writer

Tables are a good way to arrange data. Nice, structured, borders between each cell, etc.

The only question is, how do you get the data into a table format?

You can type from scratch, of course. You can painfully copy and paste.

Or if your data is set up right, with a tab or comma or other item separating the data into columns, you can just convert the text to a table.

Let's say you've got this. The arrows are tabs separating the "columns" of data.  (And let's say that it's actually about ten pages long, since this feature is a big timesaver but only if you've got a bunch of data to convert.) The blue is just artistic license.

Select it all.

Choose Table > Convert > Text to Table.

You'll see this window, where you can specify exactly what separates each column of data. It might be a tab, a comma, etc. Also set the options for headings, in the bottom part of the window. The example text here has headings, but yours might not.

 

If, through some sort of search-and-replace procedure, or for whatever reason, the % or & character separates each column, then you can specify that. As long as it's a keyboard character, you can specify it.

 

Click OK, and you've got your table.

 

---

AutoFormats in OpenOffice Writer (Also Works in OpenOffice Calc Spreadsheets)

It's time for autoformats. Autoformats are going to save you SO much time, if you do tables with even vaguely complex formatting. Autoformats are like styles for tables -- they capture all the complicated border and shade formatting, "freeze" it under a name like Gray and Red Table, and can be applied easily to new tables.

This is part 3 of the Table series ( here's the first post and here's the second post). Last time, we talked about how, while there are many formatting options for tables and a lot of control, it's a lot of work to do that formatting. And in a large document with 20 or even 2000 tables, that turns into a ginormous amount of work.

Let's say you've got this table, and you need it formatted this way. And you need the other 147 tables in the document formatted this way, too.

All you have to do is:

1. Get the table formatted how you want—including fonts, number formatting (right-click on a number in a cell and choose Number Format), etc. AutoFormats preserve not just formatting characteristics but also fonts.

2. Turn it into an Autoformat

3. Apply that Autoformat to other tables

I've already done step 1, formatting the table.

Let's do step 2. Here's how to make an Autoformat.

Select the formatted table and choose Table > Autoformat.

In the window that appears, click Add. (You might see more autoformats than this.)

In that window, type the name of the autoformat, as descriptively as possible. Click OK.

The autoformat appears. Click OK.

Now we're on step 3.  You have another table that you need to apply the formatting to.

Select it and choose Table > Autoformat.

Select the autoformat you want.

Click More – you can choose whether to include the other formatting shown, when you apply the autoformat.

Click OK.

You'll see the autoformat applied—I'm showing the original and the newly autoformatted tables together. Click to see the illustration larger.

Note that the outer border format is applied to the inside of one column here, since this table has one more column than the table the autoformat was based on. It's a good idea to test and tweak a little bit. If you want to do outer and inner borders differently, make your first table with three or more columns, so that the formatting applies correctly to all tables.

See how simple that was, though, overall? Reapplying the formatting is SO much faster with Autoformats. You can spend vast amounts of time applying formatting to tables manually; autoformats get rid of all that work. Also, unlike styles, autoformats aren't just available by default in the document where you created them. They're available in any document you create. 

---

Table Formatting in OpenOffice Writer (Works for Calc Spreadsheet Cells, Too)

 

This is part 2 of the Table series (here's the first post). In this post, I'll show you how to make your tables look exactly the way you want them with border colors, border styles, border placement, and shading. (The first post covered how to control column width; other posts will cover more complex items like vertical spacing, headings, captions, and other advanced table stuff.)

Let's say you've got this fabulous table full of very important information.

It's nice content, but this is, after all, for a glossy brochure on the candidates for mayor, so you want to make it look a little fancier. The candidates, especially that snob Stephanie, would be insulted if you sent this out as is.

So you'll need to make the borders and shading fancier. Bring up the Tables toolbar (View > Toolbars > Table). Dock it and drag it to the top of the work area to dock it.

Click and hold down on the downward-facing black triangle at the far right end of the toolbar and make sure you've got all four of the formatting icons: Line style, line color, borders, and backgrounds. If no check mark appears next to one of them, select it and it'll be added to the toolbar.

The first thing you do is to specify where the borders should be. You can put the borders on just horizontal lines, on horizontal and vertical (as is), on just the top and bottom of the table, etc. You do this first because if you do the formatting, then change where the borders go, all your previous formatting might go away. (Later I'll talk about AutoFormats which will solve that problem, but that's a topic for another blog.)

So select the table. Let's say that you want to put the borders only on the horizontal lines, not vertically You'd think that you'd click and hold down on the Borders icon and choose horizontal, as shown.

That's logical but that's not quite the way it works. You need to clear the border positions first by saying you don't want any borders anywhere. You can't just switch from one to another directly. So first, click on the No Borders At All icon in the upper right corner, as shown.

Now select the horizontal-only borders icon, or whatever icon you like in order to apply the border placement you want. The formatting will be applied.

Now, format up a storm. In addition to border placement, you can change:

• Border style -- Double lines, thin lines ,thick lines, etc.
• Border color -- And keep in mind that if you reallllly want to go nuts, you can make your own colors.
• Background shading -- A background color for the heading row is one nice effect. Alternating shading can be very effective for making long tables easier to read. Be sure that you change the font color as necessary to make sure the table is legible.

 

Border Style
Select the table, select the border style icon, and pick something.

Border Color
Select the table, select the border color icon, and pick something.

Background Shading
Select the table, select the background shading icon, and pick something.

Removing a Color
To remove border color or background shading formatting, choose the No Fill option.

Here's your table. (It's pretty horrible in color, of course, but it shows some of the effects.)

 

Now, you might also want to just apply formatting to one row. For instance, you can select the heading row, apply a heavier border style and different border color and shading color. Maybe you just have shading on the heading row and nowwhere else. The basic message here is, select the column or row to apply formatting to; you don't have to apply the same formatting to the entire table.

Here's the big cahuna, which I'm just going to touch on lightly since it's really just about whatever you want to do with it. Let's say you want some really specific formatting in different parts of the table. Select the table, choose Table > Table Properties, and click the Borders tab.

As when you used the toolbar icons, you first select WHERE you want the formatting. Use the prefab icons or click on a line in the User-Defined area. To deselect a line, click on it again or click somewhere else.

Then specify the formatting such as line style, color, etc.

Set other options such as distance from text, shadow, etc.

Click OK.

All That Work to Format Just One Table?????

This was a lot of work, wasn't it?

Doing it once is a lot of work. Doing it 40 times is hard labor.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were something like styles, but for tables, that would preserve the formatting for a table and allow you to reapply it to any other table?

Hmmm.... ;>

Tune in next time.

---

OpenOffice Tables in Writer: A Set of Solid Basics

A reader wrote to me with some questions about moving tables, and I realized I hadn't done much about tables in this blog.  It's high time, of course. Writer tables are a bit different than in MS Word, so it's definitely worth explaining those key differences.

Here's a basic table in Writer. Nothing surprising--you have a header row (optional) with different formatting (by default), and borders on every column and row (by default).

 

This is the first post, on creating them, moving them, changing width, etc. All the table blogs will be in the new Tables category.

Creating Tables

Creating tables is pretty simple. Just choose Insert > Table, or Table > Insert > Table. When you get the following window, just mark your choices. Keep in mind that the number of rows includes the heading row (which you usually want, but not always).

Another approach is to click and hold down on the Table icon shown, in the toolbar at the top of your work area, and just select the layout you want.

 

Turn On Nonprinting Characters

It's much easier to tell what's going on in text documents, and in tables, if you have nonprinting characters showing. These are mainly the carriage returns, but also spaces (little dots) and tabs (arrows). Choose View > Nonprinting Characters and select it to put a checkmark by it.

 

The nonprinting characters will appear.

Make Sure You've Got the Table Toolbar

The Table toolbar has a host of goodies to use. Choose View > Toolbars > Table if you don't see it.

Drag it up to be with the rest of the toolbars and release, to dock it, so that it will stay around rather than appearing and disappearing as you click in and out of the table.

What If You Want a Space Above Your Table?

Here's something that happens a lot. You've inserted a table at the top of the document, but now you need text above the table.

All you have to do is click in the upper left corner and press Return.

Deleting Tables

If you just select a table and its content and press Delete, only the content is deleted. Now, if you just want to delete the content, that's great. But to delete the table, you need to do one of the following:

Select the blank line above the table, as well as the table, and press Delete.

Or select the table, right-click, choose Row > Delete or Column > Delete.

 

Or select  the table, and click the Delete Row or Delete Column icon on the Table toolbar.

Adding Rows or Columns

You can add rows or columns with the icons on the toolbar. Click in the row or column next to where you want to add the row or column, and click the appropriate green icon.

You can also click in the lower right cell of a table and press Tab. You'll get a new row.

Moving Tables

If you want to move a table, just cut and paste. Select the whole table, plus the blank line above it. Cut (Ctrl X), then go to where you want the table and paste (Ctrl V).

Changing Column Width Manually

You can drag the column widths to change them, or use the big properties window.

Here's how to drag:

Click in the column that you want to change. You'll see markers on the ruler for the columns.

Move your mouse over the column marker. You'll see the mouse pointer change as shown.

Click and hold down on the column marker and drag it right or left to change width.

Release and the column will have a new width.

To change the right and left margins of the tables, move your mouse over the part of the ruler where it changes from white to gray, and drag as you did to change the column width.

To do this in a window instead, select the table and choose Table > Table Properties. Click the Column tab and type the width values for each column. Click OK.

When this blog continues....more on things like borders and shading, autoformats, automatic column width adjustments, and much more!

---

Creating XML Forms From Scratch in OpenOffice -- They're a Lot More Helpful Than Input Field Forms

I've written a TechTarget article about how to create forms from scratch.

The point is that, whilst training some folks in Kentucky (the Dr. Hobo gang ;> ), I realized that the commonly used input field forms (see example in the article) are OK in their way but not as helpful as they could be to the people using them. Certainly not as helpful as the XML forms that can contain dropdown lists, formatted date and time fields, checkboxes, etc. Thus, I think folks who use a lot of input field forms should seriously consider ditching those in favor of XML forms. The switch can result in increased speed when entering data, reduced errors, and reduced training time for people starting to use the forms.

This isn't about forms that are hooked up to database forms. This is specifically addressed at all those forms that you or someone else fills in on the computer, then prints or saves with the information in the form. You can of course use this info for forms hooked up to databases; that's just not the focus.

OpenOffice User's Guide: Now With Bar Code Information for Envelopes

The User's Guide from the OpenOffice.org community now has information for putting bar codes on envelopes! It's all about getting the right POSTNET font, I understand.

Assigning OpenOffice or StarOffice Styles With the Keyboard, and Some Handy Reformatting Keyboard Shortcuts

I occasionally mention, in class, that you can apply styles with the keyboard too. However, I'm a menu user by nature so I usually forget to emphasize it enough. Here are the steps for setting up styles so you can apply them with a keyboard shortcut. The procedure comes from the new Tips and Tricks blog from the folks creating the OpenOffice.org / StarOffice Help.

1. Select Tools - Customize from the main menu
2. Select the Keyboard tab
3. Select the shortcut key to assign from the list of shortcut keys
4. Select Style from the Category list
   Scroll right down to the Styles entry and click the + sign to show the style types of OOo
5. Select the style to assign from the Function list
6. Click Ok

I also want to include two very useful comments from that blog entry:

Two other useful shortcuts related to this are: Ctrl+0 - Apply the style "Default" to the current or to the currently selected paragraph(s) Ctrl+Shift+Space - Reset the formatting of the current selection to the style applied, i.e. remove any "hard" or manual formatting from it.

Posted by Lutz Hoeger on May 17, 2006 at 07:53 AM CEST #

Thanks, Lutz. We should have mentioned these.
I actually use Ctrl+Shift+Space very often in ill-formatted docs where direct formatting prevents changes of styles to get visible.

Posted by Frank Peters on May 17, 2006 at 09:51 AM CEST #

Doing Equations, Formulas, Pi, Etc. in OpenOffice Writer and Calc -- And Impress, Updated February 2007

Sooner or later, no matter who you are, you're going to have to talk about pi. Or you're going to need to talk about squaring lambda. (Mmm....squaring lambda.....) Or you'll need to have a+b+c divided by 2.

How do you do that in OpenOffice?

The first step is to just go to the old reliable Insert menu. Anything out of the realm of plain text, just go to the Insert menu.

Just Using the Special Characters Window

Now, if you just want a Special Character, pi or lambda or something, you can choose Insert > Special Character.

Find the one you want. If you select several you'll see them all displayed at the right side of the window and they'll all be inserted.

Then just click Insert. The character will show up.

It's a pain to scroll through all that again and again so make an AutoText entry for it. See

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/03/automatic_text_.html

Using the Formulas Features

If you need something more complex, then instead, choose Insert > Object > Formula.

You get an editing window at the bottom, a box for the equation in the document, and a little shortcut window floating off to the side.

Now,  you can use the little shorcut window. Click an item above the line, then click an item below the line and that inserts some placeholder stuff for you in the editing window.

   

But frankly I find it not that helpful since just writing the formulas is reasonably easy once you memorize a few tips.

• Use the Formula Reference Tables online help list to see how to enter formulas. Basically, do it how you think it would work. Use the OpenOffice.org Math Examples online  help list to see examples. These are really good. Just press F1 while you're in the editing window; you can type the titles of these topics into the Find or Index window.

• Use ^ for exponents, as in 3^2  which would be three, squared.
• Use sqrt for square root
• Use % in front of the written version of a symbol, as in %pi

So here are a few formulas. They're pretty easy to figure out. Click each image to see a slightly larger version, if you like.

a + b / $pi

a + b over $pi

(a + b) over $pi

If You Don't Know How to Write Out a Character Like %pi or %rho

Click the Sigma icon at the top to add a special character.

You can just scroll  through and select something from the list, and insert it.

Or you can add something yourself if you don't see what you need.

Optional: Add your own symbol   

To add something you don't see, click Edit.

Find what you want, by scrolling and manipulating all the dropdowns. Then name it, and click Add, not Edit.

The new symbol will show up in the symbol list.

Click in the document to stop editing the formula.

If you want to get back into the formula to change it, double-click the box the formula is in.

Formatting the Formula

All right. You've got a great formula. But it's really small. Or you'd like a different font. You change these by selecting the formula in the editing window and click on the Format menu.

Choosing Fonts gives you this window. You get to choose the font by the type: variables, etc. Click and hold down on the Modify button to change any font.

Select the font in this window, then click OK all the way back out of the windows.

That's About It

Insert > Object > Formula. Type what you want and use the online help and the brief tips I gave you.

Click in the document when you're done, and double-click the equation box to start editing again.

To format, select the text in the editing box and find the Format menu.

To add a symbol you don't know, click the Epsilon icon at the top of the window and select one--or click Edit to create your own.

Doing All This in Impress

I'm using 2.1 in February 2007 and it works just fine.

Click in a bulleted item and choose Insert > Object > Formula.

You can also paste the formula object from Writer to Impress. Don't paste it into a bullet in this case; just paste it into a layout with no bullets.

Double-click to edit, as usual.

Double-click the formula object to get into edit mode. Use the Format menu or make other changes.

---

OpenOffice Pan-Galactic Post: Posts on Charts, PDF, Spreadsheets, Templates, Drawings, OpenOffice Training, Toolbars, and Much More

I've been having a problem that some of you might sympathize with--getting posts to show up in Technorati. So as a cheater, I've created this post that links to a bunch of posts that I don't think have been showing up. Not all of them like links to current discussions or issues, just the ones I think are  important that have been missed.

So I'm sorry this isn't new content, but perhaps somewhere in the last six months there's something useful that Technorati didn't let you see the first time around.

Templates, Writer, general setup and toolbars

• Creating and using OpenOffice templates, including converting Microsoft Word templates for use in OpenOffice
• Doing calculations in tables
• The styles posts on what they are, how to get styles from one document to another, how to create and update them, etc.
• The much-discussed topic of centering text vertically in a Writer document
• Starting page numbering on page 2 and related topics (relates to page styles)
• Tables of contents
• Searching and replacing for carriage returns (paragraph breaks), tabs, and other items, using regular expressions (regex)
• Creating your own toolbar
• Setting up OpenOffice under Tools > Options and Tools > Autocorrect. This is how to turn off word completion, stop automatic formatting, set defaults, increase icon size, and much more.

Calc spreadsheets and charts

• Calc spreadsheet data entry shortcuts
• Dragging a cell in a spreadsheet (see the end of the post)
• Charts in Calc and Writer; how to click in just the right spot and modify exactly what you want.
• Opening a CSV text file in Calc so that it opens as a spreadsheet. Useful if you export files from databases of other formats and want to create them as spreadsheets or databases in OpenOffice.
• Controlling what people can put into spreadsheets with error messages, online help for the cell, ranges of permitted data, etc.

Draw, Diagrams, Impress presentations

• Using the 3D shapes in Draw (I love this stuff)
• Using OpenOffice FontWork, which is kind of like WordArt
• Creating your own arrows and other line ends for UML diagrams and other purposes
• Using the OpenOffice Gallery to store graphics; this too is useful for UML diagrams
• Printing Impress presentation handouts

Web publishing and PDF

• What I did with the web tools, creating colors, image maps, etc. to redo my getopenoffice.org StarOffice and OpenOffice Training page
• PDF, with linked articles on PDF presentations, and using hyperlinked PDFs. That post is particularly interesting since you can generate PDFs from linked OpenOffice.org documents, and the links carry over to the PDF.
• Using the wonderful Web Wizard (that's the techtarget article, here's the blog link) for creating web sites from existing OpenOffice, Microsoft, and graphics documents. You can also use it for  PDF batch convert.

Mail merge, labels, envelopes, and databases

• The very very powerful Mail Merge Wizard.
• The less powerful but far easier Secret Mail Merge that you need to add to your toolbar.
• Creating OpenOffice.org databases from spreadsheets, text files, and your address book. Even Access databases are easy.
• A bunch of articles for TechTarget.com on creating databases from scratch in Base,  creating forms, doing reports, views and joins between tables , and all the fun new stuff in the Openoffice Base database module.
• How to do labels the regular way, and manually.

Openoffice training, change management, and general discussions

• My thoughts on training and its benefits.
• My suggestions for transitioning to OpenOffice.org, including the change management aspects.
• Why OpenDocument Format is important (parental advisory, contains references to tube tops).
• Switching to OpenOffice.org, or any open source product, means you can spend the budget leftover on something important. Education, firefighters--anything that's more important than using Microsoft Office.
• Office 2007 could be a big retraining job. Think about whether you'd rather spend money and time upgrading to Office 2007, or just time on switching to OpenOffice.

---

Making Postcards, Brochures, and Other Cool Stuff With OpenOffice Writer and Draw, and Existing Microsoft Templates

Update: See The Linux Box for more ready-made OpenOffice Impress templates.

One of the biggest losses people experience when switching to open source is the loss of all those cool templates. They are, as the song says, a hard habit to break.

The good news is, you usually don't have to break the habit. (Unless you've been using Publisher, unfortunately, and you can't open Publisher files in anything—not even Word.) Here's how to keep on using the same templates you know and love; find new ones, or create your own in Draw and Writer.

You Can Still Use Your Own Word Templates and Any Others You Can Find

Here's where you might really start to enjoy the value of OpenOffice.org's compatibility with Microsoft Office.
You can still use all those Microsoft Office templates you got with the software. (Assuming the license doesn't forbid it--just putting that in just in case. ;> ) In OpenOffice.org, just choose File > Open, go to Program Files\Microsoft Office\templates (or wherever) and find the one you want. 

You can also set up OpenOffice.org to just find those templates. See this blog on templates. Go to the end.

And you can google around for more. I googled for “postcard templates” and came to this nice site from HP. The templates are available not just in Publisher but in Word. Click the image to see it larger if you like.

http://www.hp.com/sbso/productivity/office/direct_marketing.html

Follow a few links, and you get here. Click the image to see it larger if you like.

http://www.hp.com/sbso/productivity/office/stocklayout/stocklayout_overview.html

 

I decided to download the postcard template and the brochure template. I clicked on each; here's what it looked like to choose the brochure template.

Once the files were downloaded, I just went to OpenOffice.org, chose File > Open,  and opened them in OpenOffice Writer. Here's what the postcard template looks like.

 

I modified it according to my own information; it was relatively easy. Here's what that looks like. Here's the file itself. Right-click on the link and choose to save link as.

So that's really all there is to it. Use your own  or find new ones. There are a zillion free templates out there, and you can use the Word format templates (or Powerpoint, or Excel) in OpenOffice.org. Just google for the free ones, or ask friends where they are.

Making Your Own Postcards, Brochures, etc. in Draw and Writer

Now, that's not all the fun. If you want to create a postcard yourself, let's say in Draw, you can go ahead and do that, too. Or a brochure, or anything with specific measurements.

(You can do this in Writer to; I'm just showing it in Draw since the previous section was all about Writer.)

You need to know three  things.
- Choose Format > Page and click the Page tab to set the overall page size and orientation.

- Use the drawing tools like the text box and shapes to create the borders of the items in the document. Choose View > Toolbars > Drawing to bring up that toolbar.

- Select any item, right-click, and choose Position and Size. In the window that appears, click the Position and Size tab. will let you specify that the border of the postcard box, for instance, is 4x6. Remember to mark or unmark the Keep Ratio checkbox depending on whether you want to change one measurement of the object or both.

 

So let's do an example.

 

I'm going to create another postcard template. So I choose File > New > Drawing to create a new Draw document. I choose Format > Page, click the Page tab, and set the page size and margins.  I'll need a document that's like the first one or the second one, depending on what I'm printing on.

Option 1: A document with no margins, 6 across by 8 high (for two 4x6 postcards), and portrait orientation

Option 2: A document with half-inch margins, 7 across by 9 high (for two 4x6 postcards with two half-inch margins around the outside),  and portrait orientation

Next, I create a box to show me where the content should go. I just click on the rectangle tool in the Drawing toolbar and draw the box. I don't want a fill in it so I make the fill Invisible.

I right-click on the border of the rectangle, choose Position and Size, and click on the Position and Size tab. I choose 6 wide by 4 high, and unmark the Keep Ratio checkbox.

I put the edge of the box against the edge of where the postcard paper will end.

At this point, I make a template of it, so I can get at it again. See this blog on templates. If you want my document to download and make into a template,  here it is. Right-click on the link and choose to save link as.

 

Now I just make one version of the postcard, the way I want it. I put the content in the box, keeping in mind I need a bit of space between the text and the edge of the paper.

 

I copy the postcard and paste it, and drag the pasted version down to the bottom end of the document.

 

And now I just delete the boxes.

 

That's all there is to it. A little bit of work to set up, but the template takes care of that; you only need to do it once.

 

---

OpenOffice Styles: What, Why, and How to Use Them

March 2006: I've had some trouble getting some of my posts to show up, so I'm reposting a couple of the ones I think are most important.

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 just the lead-in to  a big multi-blog post, grouped into a few different ones.

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

---

OpenOffice Templates: Making Them, and Making New Documents Based on Them (Writer, Calc and Impress): Updated March 2006

March 2006: I've added info at the end about how to point to a directory of templates.

This is embarrassing. I have a huge blogapalooza on styles but left out templates. (Updated it yesterday a bit but still, no real thorough coverage.)

I shall remedy that immediately.

All right. Let's say you have the following:

• A bunch of styles you need to have when you create a document.
• Some canned text, like your signature or a graphic logo, that you use in a lot of documents
• Or you're just darned picky about how you want your documents ;>

You are an excellent candidate for using templates. Templates are documents that store styles, text, graphics, general formatting—whatever you want. You create a document, save it as a template in the Template Place, then point to that template when you want to create a new document using what it's got. (“Styles and canned text...that's what it's got....remember that.”)

And it really couldn't be easier.

Making a Template

Open a new document.

Put in it what you want in the template. Styles, graphics, text of every kind and variety. Whatever.

Then choose File > Templates > Save.

Specify My Templates unless you have another idea for a category.

(To create a new category, click the Organizer button, select a category in the button that appears, right-click on it and choose New. An untitled category will appear. IMMEDIATELY start typing the name of your new category. Click somewhere else in the category list when you're done typing. Click Close.)

Type the name of your template like Meeting Minutes.

Click OK.

Now you've got a template.

Using a Template

You need to create a new document using that template.

Choose File > New > Templates and Documents.

Select the Template icon on the left.

Open the category you chose like My Templates. You'll see your template.

Click Open and you'll have a new untitled document based on that template.

The Coolest Part—Making That Template Come Up When You Create Any New Document

Choosing File > New > Templates and Documents is fine but what if that's your template you use all the time? You can make it come up when you just choose File > New > [type of document] by setting it as the default template.

Choose File > Templates > Organize.

Open the category your template is in, in the left side.

Right-click on the template and choose Set as Default Template.

Click Close. You're done! Choose File > New > [type of document] and you'll see the effect.

To switch back to the normal original boring blank document, repeat the steps but this time choose Reset Default Template > [type of document]

Pointing to an Existing Directory of Templates

If you have a bunch of templates, Microsoft or OpenOffice.org, set up OpenOffice.org to know where they are. Then you can get to them as above by choosing File > New > Templates and Documents.

Converting, If You Want to Point to Microsoft Format Templates
First, if they're in Microsoft format, you need to convert them to OpenOffice format. Choose File > Wizards > Document Converter. Follow the wizard through to create a converted set of copies of the templates.

Step 1.

Step 2, then just follow the wizard as prompted.

Pointing to Templates to Use
Now, choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Paths. Select the Templates line.

Click Edit, then click Add, and add the path to the templates you want to point to. (Click this image to see a larger version if you like.)

Click OK, and OK, and OK  again.

Now you'll see the templates when you choose File > New > Templates and Documents.

---

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

What Are Your Thoughts on Writely?

I must admit, I've been a little curious about the whole Writely thing. (Perhaps a bit miffed too, since it seemed like Google and OpenOffice were going to ride off into the sunset together. ;> )

I found a review of Writely.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/08/31/writely-process-words-with-your-browser/

Here's another article with a screen shot.

Does anyone have any comments on Writely to make? Good, bad, cool, weird?

---

TechTarget Article: The Secret of the Missing Mail Merge

I've written an article for TechTarget.com about using the Mystery Mail Merge. The one that used to be in 1.x, and now...well, it's in there, but how the heck do you get to it?

I cover that, and how basically it's just a dandy middle-of-the-road choice between rolling your own, and using the powerful but complex Mail Merge Wizard (they're two different things).

---

---

Tags: OpenOffice.org open office OpenOffice.org training open office training open source labels mail merge Linux menus envelopes base solveig haugland solveig haugland 

TechTarget.com Article: Charts

I've written an article for TechTarget.com about using the OpenOffice.org Writer and Calc chart tools. It basically says, OK, the tools are like trying to find the right candlestick to twist to reveal the secret bookcase, but once you've found the secrets, there are some decent capabilites.

It got slashdotted on Tuesday! Very exciting. Thanks to ScuttleMonkey and Jane Walker for posting it.

Of course, the slashdoterati slammed it six ways from Sunday but no more than the usual slashdot treatment, I think. ;>   Anything with a Nancy Drew intro is going to draw that type of attention in the  slashdot environment. (Though if you've used the chart tools, I think you'll agree that there's a certain validity to the analogy. With, of course, the corresponding "Whoohoo!" feeling when the mystery is solved.)

Let's hear from you on charts!
There's always another way to do charts (or anything), of course. What are your tips for using charts? Especially for some of the hard-core scientific stuff, which I don't do much of (any of...) so I'm not that familiar with what the charts need to do.

What's your favorite chart technique?

---

Tags: OpenOffice.org  open office  OpenOffice.org training  open office training  open source  open source training  StarOffice  Linux   education  database  base 

TechTarget Article: The Web Wizard

This article I wrote for TechTarget is about the fabulous Web Wizard and its uses for mass PDF conversion and quick web publishing of existing documents. And how it's just been hiding there from me for months. Cheeky wizard.

Update March 4th: The article was posted on Lifehacker.com! I'm very excited. It's been a very big week--I was Newsforged for the Office 2007 blog and Lifehackered for the web wizard article.

---

Tags

OpenOffice.org pdfconverter expresspdf html to pdf open source html web publishing convert to pdf convert education Microsoft Office batch PDF printing

---

Opening CSV or Text Files as Calc Spreadsheets--and Vice Versa

When I worked at Sun, there were a few things people always asked, that were hard to figure out.

- How do you print the same rows or columns on every page of a spreadsheet? (See this post. )

- How do you print handouts for a presentation? (See this post.) 

- How do you get a blank paragraph line above a table that's at the top of a document? (You now simply have to press Return in the upper left cell of the table.)

Another very common question was:

How in the world do you open a perfectly good .txt  or .csv file (comma-separated values) in a spreadsheet? Basically, you've got data in rows and columns, but separated by tabs or commas rather than columns in a spreadsheet, and you want it in a spreadsheet. Comma-delimted files are a common way to get data out of a spreadsheet or database and into another.

The trouble is, in OpenOffice.org, if you just choose File > Open, the .txt or .csv file opens in Writer. Not what you want.

   

 

Here's how to open it in a Calc spreadsheet.

 

Opening a .txt or .csv File in a Calc Spreadsheet

1. Start OpenOffice.org. You can be in Writer, Draw, Calc—it doesn't matter.

2. Choose File > Open. (Click the picture to see a larger version of it, if you want.)

3. In the File Type list, select Text CSV. It's about a third of the way down the list of types, or you can click in the file type list and press T four times.

4. The window should now look like this, so just click Open.

5. You'll get a window where you specify how the file was created: what separates the data into columns, etc. (Click the picture to see a larger version, if you want.)

6. Also in the same window, if you have date-format data or other formats you want to specify, you can do that column by column.

7. When you're done, just click OK. You'll see the data in a spreadsheet.

8. You'll want to save it as a spreadsheet at some point. Choose File > Save As and select the standard OpenSpreadsheet .ods format.

9. Click Save.

 

 

 

Saving a Calc Spreadsheets as a .txt or .csv File

1. Let's say it's the other way around—you've got a spreadsheet and you want it to be in a nice neutral .txt or .csv file. Be sure the file is open.

 

2. Choose File > Save As and select the same Text CSV format in the file format list. This time you can click T just once.

3. Click Save.

 

4. You'll probably see this message. Click Yes.

 

 

5. In the next window, specify the type of character you want to separate columns, commas or tabs or another character.

6. Click OK; you're done.

 

---

Tags

OpenOffice.org    open office    OpenOffice.org training    open office training   open source   open source training   Office 12  Linux   comma-separated   text   databases  calc  spreadsheets    csv