Beginning OpenOffice 3

CHAPTER 3 Writer Automation (S. 75-76)

Writer, as we've seen, can be used for a lot of different tasks, but it really comes into its own when working on long, complex documents such as dissertations, reports, and even books. These documents have "words" at their heart, and Writer is fundamentally a word processor designed for the purpose of writing and editing text.

Letters can be written in any old text editor, for example, and high- end DTP software will do a better job of dealing with design- intensive documents such as magazines, newspapers, or posters. But Writer's main purpose is allowing a user to compose, edit, and organize words. The elements discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 such as frames, images, and paragraph formatting feed into this, and an understanding of these processes provides a good basis for moving onto the options available for automating the organization and production of a finished document.

The document you'll be working on in this chapter is a long piece of academic writing (see Figure 3-1), which will allow you to explore many of the automation and document management facilities in Writer. And although this is a specific form of writing, the techniques you'll be using to create it are equally useful in other tasks, including letter writing and newsletter design, where consistency is important.

For example, in Chapters 1 and 2, you manually formatted paragraphs and page elements using various tools and options. With Writer's style system, you can take that formatting and turn it into a "style" that can then be applied across a document, to other documents of the same type, or, in the case of the newsletter, in future issues. Any word-processing task that is likely to be repeated can benefit from a little automation.

The Basic Page
The letter you created in Chapter 1 took you a little way down the road to automation by starting with a template, in this chapter, you'll create and edit a cascade of styles, using the information OO.o keeps about the author, setting up styles to make it simple to build a dynamic table of contents (TOC), and adding references using Writer's built-in bibliographic database. You'll also start with a much more complicated basic page, so begin by choosing File New Text document and then go into the page formatting section (Format)