Now, we click on "Paragraph Styles" in the Stylist, search for "Footer" (that the text in the footer uses pre-defined), right-click to modify it, and set "Alignment" to "Right" or "Centered", wherever we want to see the page numbers. We do the same to move the title in the header to, let's say, centered position. (Right-click "Header" in the "Paragraph Styles", "Alignment" - "Center"). Easy, huh? Now, we'll take a closer look at the "Paragraph Styles". Just like "Page Styles" does with the page layout, this helps you to format all possible kinds of headings, titles, subtitles, the header and footer, the "normal" text body, and so on. Now, let's have a close look on my diploma. I used 21 different styles. This may sound like a lot, but really it isn't: I heavily used and customized only 4 styles myself, “Heading 1”, “Heading 2”, “Text Body” and “Quotations”. The rest was either automatically set by OpenOffice.org, or touched once, like “Title”, “Header” and “Footer”.
We click on the first page, "Insert" - "Fields" - "Title". The title displays at the upper left edge of the page. Now we look at the Paragraph Styles: "Default" is still highlighted. So we search through the Paragraph Styles until we find "Title" and double-click it. Whoa, it's centered and the font is bigger now! How that? Well, you probably guessed it, "Title" uses different settings than "Default". We modify the "Title"-style and we see that we can do almost anything with your title. Ah, yeah, and if it is not clear yet: if you ever want to change the document's title, just do that in "File" - "Properties" - "Description" and all the title-fields you have inserted into your document are automatically updated. You can add a subject (or subtitle) easily by writing it into the "Comments"-section there and doing "Insert" - "Fields" – “Subject”. Also your name? “Insert” - “Fields” - “Author”. Notice that you have to add your name in “Tools” - “Options” - “User Data” before!
Now, we'll jump down to our "Default"-section, where the actual text will be located. Let's type a first heading. Afterwards, we select it, search for "Heading 1" in the Paragraph Styles, and double-click that. We adjust the heading by modifying "Heading 1", again not by changing it directly, because we want all the "Heading 1"-class headings of our document appear in the same way. Now we hit "Enter", double-click "Heading 2" and type your first subheading (or type it first, select it and assign "Heading 2", as we did before). Notice that we are not adding any outline numbers, OpenOffice.org will do that for us later. Now, we'll hit "Enter" again and type some text. Watch out, the text should not be "Default", but "Text Body". Assign that if needed, modify as you wish. One nice example: we modify "Text body" - "Indents & Spacing" - "First Line" from 0,00 to 0,50.
This gives all our paragraphs a nice indent. Now we'll add another Heading, two Subheadings and some more text. Now we definitely need outline numbers for our headings. Easy enough: "Tools" - "Outline Numbering". Select "1-10", "Number" = "1,2,3,..." and we add a separator after the numbering (I used [.space] in my screenshot). Wow, all my headings are numbered now, with the scheme "1. Heading Class 1", "1.1. Heading Class 2", "2. Heading Class 1", "2.1. Heading Class 2", "2.2. Heading Class 2". This is really starting to shape up nicely! Of course, we can add headings later as we wish, everything gets updated automatically.
Time for some magic again: we go up to our index, click "Insert" - "Indexes and Tables" - "Ok". Now, this one is nice. No more cruel hand-adding an index after writing a document. It just works automatically, if you have properly declared your headings via the Stylist! Now, modify "Heading 1" again, we "Enable" a "Page Break" in "Text Flow". All our headings (class 1 only) move to the start of the next page. We can also do that for our headings class 2 of course. Notice that you have to click into your automatically created table of contents, right-click it and chose "Update Index/Table" if we change the order or position of something inthe document, because the table of contents is not updated automatically. Or do you want to update everything in the whole document? Choose “Tools” - “Update” - “Update all”.
So, that's the basics for editing long documents. Now let's have a short look on another useful tool in OpenOffice.org, a tool that really helps editing really large documents. The Navigator! As the name already assumes, this serves a totally different purpose than the Stylist. Don't mix it up with the Stylist, you can open the Navigator by pressing F5 or via "Edit" - "Navigator". It is accessible in the "Function Bar", on the left of the icon for the Stylist. If we assigned the appropriate Paragraph Styles to our headings, it is much easier to navigate through our document. Just double-click the entry (heading, table, note, graphic, whatever...) and the cursor automatically jumps there. Really nice when you have more than 100 pages, believe me. The Navigator gives you a really nice feeling of complete control over your document. Its usefulness increases literally exponentially with the size of your document.
So, that was our small introduction into the wonders of OpenOffice.org Writer. I hope you enjoyed it and got something out of it. I certainly did...
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About the Author:
Christian Paratschek, 28, is an IT-Administrator in Vienna, Austria, Europe. When he does not write hypercomplicated articles about word processors, he likes to break his right forefinger while playing beach volleyball (even though he does not look like a typical beach volleyball player). Well, whatever...
Christoph Noack, a 24 years old self taught OpenOffice.org enthusiast, tries to escape from writing his thesis by annoying randomly choosen osnews article writers: Next time it could be you!
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