Apache OpenOffice Writer for students by David Paenson, B. A. Hons.
IMPRESSUM Copyright David Paenson 2008© Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache. org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
CONTENTS 1 Introduction 27 Tables 2 Automation 28 Charts 3 Document Structure 29 Snapshots 4 First Steps 30 Pictures 5 Headings 31 Presentations & Graphics 6 Chapter Numbering 32 Cross Tables (Statistics) 7 Table of Contents 33 Extra Long Web Addresses 8 Outline 34 Fonts 9 Navigating your Text 35 Emphasis 10 Group Work 36 Special Characters 11 Proofreading 37 Non separable combinations 12 Paragraph Style “Text Body” 38 Shortcut keys 13 More on Styles 39 Mouse Clicks 14 Exp
1 Introduction This short guide is based on introductory courses I have been giving since 2008 to all first year students at the Faculty of Social Work at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences. Participants’ suggestions and criticisms have all been included as well as the results of many hours spent with students formatting their thesis.
2 Automation Your thesis like any other typical document, book or magazine will contain a number of recurring elements such as headings, footnotes, page layouts, the main text body, quotations, literature lists, pages etc. (see illustration 1). All these elements need to be formatted uniformly. Additionally many of these elements, such as pages, headings, footnotes, lists, illustrations etc. need to be numbered. Finally, the table of contents and other tables can then be generated automatically.
Note: The decision what is a heading and what it should look like are two separate decisions. 4 First Steps When embarking on a new text you will invariably ask yourself: should I concentrate just on the content and leave the formatting till later? Or should I try to format the text properly right from the beginning? The second approach is the right one. Using Styles is so easy there is really no reason why you shouldn’t apply them right from the start.
• single line spacing • conciseness Here my formatting suggestions for the first three levels of headings: Style Font Size Typeface Spacing above Spacing below Chapter headings (level 1) Garamond 16pt Bold 1.2 cm 0.5 cm Section headings (level 2) Garamond 13pt Bold 1 cm 0.4 cm Subsection headings (level 3) Garamond 13pt Italic 0.8 cm 0.
2.2 Section 2.3 Section etc. Per level you should have at least two headings. If you have a 2.1 heading then you should also have a 2.2 heading, a 2.1 all alone would definitely be a mistake. If you are going to use a third or even fourth level, then leave these unnumbered and don’t include them in the table of contents. I myself have used two levels in this document, but only actually included the first one in my table of contents and also only numbered this first level.
activate automatic numbering, then they all get together and insert their various contributions into a new, empty document and finally, with the help of the Navigator, they sort the chapters into their final positions (see sections 9 and10 for more details). Automated numbering is switched on using the menu Tools › Outline Numbering (see illustration 2).
7 Table of Contents Having told the programme what are your headings and having activated their automatic numbering, you can now insert an automatically generated Table of Contents: Insert › Indexes and Tables › Indexes and Tables. In the pop-up menu you can Evaluate up to Level of your choice. So you might well have four levels of headings in your text but choose to include only the uppermost two levels.
When your table of contents appears, you will notice that most of the entries have been moved to the right with the dotted tab stops in the wrong place. This is due to the value 0,0cm which you left untouched in the previous step.
Illustration index. The various tables, illustrations and so on in your text need to have a Caption, which will then appear in the index. You could combine several indices into one naming it “Illustrations and Tables”. For this to work your tables’ caption would have to be fitted into the category of illustrations. 8 Outline Sometimes you might be asked to hand in an outline of your work in advance of the actual homework or thesis.
10 Group Work More and more students have to give in group papers. Up to four or even more authors might be involved. To facilitate the joining together of the various contributions do the following: • agree on certain general parameters so as to ensure overall uniformity of document, e.g.
• make all the appropriate changes applicable to your standard default pages, e.g.
• you save your file under a new name to be on the safe side (see section 41) • you open your file and choose the menu Edit › Changes › Accept or Reject; • a list of changes pops up which you can click on and either Accept or Reject (alternatively you can accept or reject changes directly in your text using the right mouse button) • if several people are involved as correctors, each one should have registered their name under Tools › Options › OpenOffice.org › User Data.
and also Characters at beginning of line from 2 to 3. This will avoid hyphenation of short words such as “impact”. line Two rather enigmatic concepts are those of Orphan control and Widow control. The former stands for the minimum number of lines a paragraph at the bottom of a page must contain if it is not to move in toto to the following page.
and thus building a kind of dependency tree – though dependencies can be broken at any point, allowing for full flexibility. The most basic style is Default. By modifying the style Default you automatically modify all other styles, thus possibly forcing you to modify these again in the opposite direction. This is the reason why you should never actually use the Default style. are no doubt the category most commonly used.
2. The more gentle solution is to delete or replace existing styles with others. For that just go to Edit › Find & Replace › More Options and tick Styles. So you would use this method to replace all occurrences of the Default style with the style Text Body. This way of going about things is especially useful for very long texts with lots of very useful styles and only a few useless ones you want to get rid of or overwrite.
Illustration 16: Microsoft Word: Lots of buttons which change around “dynamically” depending on what you are doing (German version) 16 Unnumbered First Pages You will surely want your text pages to be numbered but need to leave your first page(s) unnumbered. Also you would like your first text page to start with number 1. The solution is really quite simple.
• place your cursor at the very bottom of your title page and insert a new page for your table of contents using Ctrl + Return; this new page will automatically also be in style First Page • with your cursor placed on this second First Page insert your table of contents (see section 7) • place your cursor immediately below your table of contents • go to menu Insert › Manual Break and choose Default Style • choose Change page number starting from 1 • confirm OK So now you have two First Pages fol
• most of the automation possibilities cannot be put to use 17 Formatting your Title Page The title page is the only page where you won’t need to use styles and can, indeed should do everything manually. This is because the title page is unique. Using styles would only create extra work. The only exception would be if you were working in a publishing house producing loads of optically identical title pages – but this is not the kind of situation we are dealing with here.
This is a lead paragraph, not a header All pages are Default and have a footer to accommodate the page number Illustration 19: A short paper without a title page 19 Numbered Default Page As already mentioned, the Default page needs to be modified in order to accommodate page numbering. For this you can either activate a Header or a Footer.
20 Roman Page Numbering Roman page numbering for the introductory pages following the title page but preceding the actual text is quite easy. For this you need to create a new page style, which you will appropriately name Roman. Just place your cursor on any default page and open menu Format › Illustration 21: As numbering Format choose Roman Styles and Formatting (F11) In the menu bar choose the fourth button from the left to open the list of Page Styles.
and the programme stops bothering you. This is a mistake because in fact this automatism is extremely useful, especially as it allows you to reorder your list very easily with only one or two clicks. bering – symbol: * Illustration 22: The pop-up menu allows you to change the level of a paragraph Here in detail: 1. Tools › AutoCorrect Options › Options check the box Apply numbering – symbol: * 2. After typing “1.” and some text and pressing return, the next paragraph automatically begins with “2.” a.
22 Line Numbering Line Numbering comes in handy for interviews, so you could say: “See interview line 78”. The stumbling block here is: How do you get only the interview text numbered but not the rest? Also, you don’t want a number for every single line, but probably only for every third line. Lastly, you might possibly want numbering to restart from 1 at the beginning of each separate interview.
course) or even both, then confirm with Insert and Close. In similar fashion you can point to tables or illustrations. 24 Footnotes and References You add a footnote from the menu Insert › Footnote/Endnote › Automatic. This way the programme takes care of numbering automatically. You can even move a footnote anchor around by marking it in your text, cutting it out and pasting it before or after another foot note, and its numbering will be automatically updated.
In case you only have a few footnotes, it’s better to use a single Character instead of Automatic Numbering, e.g. a *. 25 Formatting your Literature List A literature list could look something like this: Fredrickson, George M.
An ellipsis without square brackets you would use for words left out already in the original quote or as a stylistic means for symbolizing incomplete utterances. Example: “I’m not so sure …”, she said with a sigh. ‘Single quotation marks’ you would use for quotes within a quote. A new fag apparently is the use of a two-dot ellipse in square brackets to indicate you have left out only a single word: [..]. □ When to Quote? Use quotes sparingly.
Branch Great importance Lesser Importance No Deployment All branches 83,8 15,2 1 Education and Research 91,6 7,5 0,9 Software & Consulting 91 8 1 Telecommunications 89,6 9,1 1,3 Media & Marketing 83,3 16,7 0 75 25 0 Administration 70,8 26,1 3,1 Banking & Insurance 69,7 27,3 3 67 31,9 1,1 Social & Welfare Departments Industry Table 3. Source: http://www.heise.de/open/artikel/Open-Source-ist-in-den-Unternehmen-angekommen224504.
• right click on your Chart to provide it with a meaningful caption. Note that as soon as you click on a graph, the symbols on your menu change, offering you a number of shortcuts. Double and triple clicks on chart offer you various other options. Note: Be careful not to clutter your page with too many graphs and illustrations.
5. Within xnview select area you actually need and press Shift + x so as to crop picture down to selection. 6. Press Ctrl + a to mark all contents. 7. Ctrl + c to copy contents into memory. 8. Back in your thesis press Ctrl + v to insert content of memory into your text. 9. Add a Caption. Note: Linux users might like to familiarize themselves with the programme KSnapshot.
a period of tens of thousands of years is simply unbeatable. Precisely because an image supposedly “expresses more than a thousand words” it robs the onlooker of the right to answer back; planting a picture in the middle of a text is the opposite of engaging the reader in dialogue. 32 Cross Tables (Statistics) OpenOffice Calc is not in league with specialised statistics’ programmes like SPSS or its very recommendable open source alternative PSPP.
1. Mark the two columns of interest, i.e. “sex” and “extent of rejection” in the raw data table 4, copy them into memory, go to the module Spreadsheet (menu File › New › Spreadsheet) and there insert the contents of computer memory using shortcut Ctrl + v. 2. In your spreadsheet you again mark the two columns and go to menu Data › DataPilot › Start and confirm Current selection. 3.
Illustration 28: The number of decimal places is reduced to 0 □ Example of survey involving yes/no answers In a fictitious yes/no survey we aimed to find out if handedness is related to sex. So we put the question “are you mainly right or left handed?” to a mixed group of people. The raw results are listed in table 6, the summary is to be found in table 7. To obtain grouped results as in table 7 do the following: 1.
Questionnaire 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Sex M F F M F F M F M F M F Handedness R R L R R R L R L R L R Table 6: Right- and Left-Handedness and Sex (raw data) Sex Women Men Total Result Left handedness 14% 60% 33% Right handedness 86% 40% 67% Table 7: Cross table comparison as to handedness dependent on sex Illustration 29: Pull the field "sex" onto area Row Fields and the field "handedness" both onto areas Column Fields as well as Data Fields; under Options choose Function "Count" and pressing butto
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Arial 40 pt Futura Lt BT 40 pt AaBbCcDdEeFfGg (Times New Roman 12 pt) AaBbCcDdEeFfGg (Garamond 12 pt) AaBbCcDdEeFfGg (Arial 12 pt) AaBbCcDdEeFfGg (Futura Lt BT 12 pt) As you can see, the font Arial takes up a little more room than a same sized Times New Roman, and each character stands out very clearly – good for publicity purposes. A similar font to Arial is Futura Lt BT, which takes up less space and is overall less heavy than Arial.
cial resources for the purchase of fonts and cramped space to store them and too few personnel faced similar problems. In our times of laser and offset printers this is no longer necessary. Italics have the advantage of sticking out just enough to be noticed without disturbing the overall picture. Another pretty old fashioned method used in literature lists to emphasise the author’s name is the use of SMALL CAPITALS. Better resort to the method described in Section 25 on Formatting your Literature List.
marked text will loose all individual formatting – only the paragraph style will remain active • Ctrl + m • Ctrl + s save file • Ctrl + p print file • Ctrl + f find or replace text • Ctrl + c copy marked text to computer memory • Ctrl + v insert contents of computer memory (“v” symbolizes the insertion) • Ctrl + shift + v same as above, only you can choose to insert text with reduced formatting • Ctrl + x cut out and move marked text to computer memory (“x” symbolizes the scissors) s
PDFs PDF (Portable Data Format) developed by Adobe is an open, operating system independent format. It is very popular for distributing documents. PDF documents have two big advantages: • they are protected against further manipulation (some cannot even be printed or saved or require a password to be opened) • the formatting is printer independent Use the red-white PDF button in the menu bar to export your document directly to PDF.
43 Search and Replace Under Edit › Find & Replace (Ctrl + f) you can search through your whole document for a particular string of text. If you happen to have mistyped a complicated name, you can use this menu to replace the wrong spelling with the correct one. I myself very often use the search tool for a quite different purpose: I “mark” any incomplete passages in my text with the optically salient ###, allowing me to locate them easily the next day.
Author’s or editor’s name is entered in another menu: Tools › Options › User data. This makes sense since the same document might well be edited by various people in succession – see section 11 on Proofreading. 47 Labels and Form Letters This is not what you are going to need for your studies. But perhaps in the course of a traineeship or at your work place you might be asked to print out labels for a bulk mailing. It’s really quite easy: 1.
Horizontal pitch 7,00 cm Vertical pitch 3,70 cm Width 7,00 cm Height 3,70 cm Left margin 1,20 cm Top margin 0,60 cm Columns 3 Rows 8 Table 8: Sizes and spacing for a 3x8 layout paper size A4 Illustration 30: The Format menu of the module "Labels": insert values shown and then press "New Document" Illustration 31: The new file in format A4 contains place holders which will be replaced by actual addresses while printing (whether to printer or to file) To create a bulk letter you basically f
48 Help Under the menu Help you will find easy to follow step-by-step instructions. While hovering with your mouse pointer over any button or menu, you will also be offered shorter or longer “tips” depending on your settings in Tools › Options › OpenOffice.org › General . Using Google you will usually find very useful and concise help too: simply type in a couple keywords and the term “OpenOffice” and that’s it. 49 Getting Apache OpenOffice Just go to openoffice.
• while text remains marked and to make absolutely sure that all manual formatting is definitely removed go to menu Format › Default Formatting (shortcut Ctrl + m) • unmark your text by clicking anywhere in text with left mouse key 5.
7. Activate automatic Outline Numbering for the first two levels of Chapter Headers: • Open menu Tools › Outline Numbering • in the left column Level choose level 1 • in drop-down menu Number choose option 1, 2, 3 … • repeat these steps for level 2 • ensure that Show sublevels is set to 2 • confirm with OK 8.
10. Prepare formatting style for first pages: • open menu Format › Styles and Formatting • in menu bar choose fourth button from left for Page Styles • under tab Organizer choose as Next Style › First Page (this will allow you to have more than one non-numbered “first page”) • under tab Page increase Margins › Left Margin › 3cm • confirm OK 11.
• under tab Index/Table reduce Evaluate up to level down to 2 (so you could well have three or more levels of chapter headings in your text but only the uppermost two will actually appear in your table of contents) • under the tab Entries place the cursor inside the white space between the entries E# and E • click once on the button Tab stop (in case you by mistake insert more than one Tab stop, you can delete it with Del key) • click on button All • confirm OK 16.
• confirm OK • in case you have at this point a blank page too many, just delete it with Del key 18.
