Beginning OpenOffice 3
From Novice to Professional
Published on 20. January 2009
488 pages
978-1-4302-1591-2 (ISBN)
Description
If you want to fly with OpenOffice 3.0, publish to your local wiki, create web presentations, or add maps to your documents, Beginning OpenOffice 3 is the book for you. You will arm yourself with OpenOffice.org 3.0 tools, from creating wiki docs to automating complex design steps. OpenOffice has been downloaded almost 100 million times, and this is the book that explains why.
- You learn how to adopt OpenOffice 3.0 innovations.
- You see how to work across Windows, OS X, Google, and the Web, no matter what the format.
- Mail merges and wiki docs will never seem so simple.
More details
Other editions
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Book
12/2008
APress
€69.54
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
Andy Channelle is a writer, designer, and educator. He has written for Linux Format, MacFormat, 3D World, and lots of other publications since the mid-1990s. He is a media educator and most recently successfully migrated to university teaching, working as a visiting lecturer/instructor in journalism and new media at the University of the West of England. Outside of these areas, he is also a new media consultant at Spike Island (www.spikeisland.org.uk) and has been intimately involved in the architecture, design, and deployment of the institution's new Drupal-based web site. Andy also holds a master's degree in new media.
Content
The Applications.- Writer: Basic Documents.- Design Using Writer.- Writer Automation.- Spreadsheets with Calc.- Impress: Stylish Presentations.- Creative Draw.- Turn Data into Information with Base.- Working Across Applications.- Building Web Pages.- Working with Others.- Linking and Embedding.- Extensions.
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)
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)
