OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas

Having different layout and page numbering within a document

See also my post on the pagination extension.

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.

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How to make sure that your graphics are embedded (not linked) in your documents, especially for templates

When you add a graphic to a document, you can either plop it straight in so it's stored in the document, or you can link the graphic so that the document just points to where the graphic is stored.

It looks the same either way, but here's the thing. When you email your document to someone, or post your template in a network directory, what happens to that link pointing to the graphic?

The link points back to your directory at home\documentdrafts\2008\graphics\teamphoto.gif  or whatever the path is. And your cousin in Phoenix or the other people on your team can't get to that graphic.

So what you want to do, typically, when you're sending documents or templates to other people that those people need to work with, is to make sure that your graphics are embedded in your document.

NOTE: If you're doing large books or other documents where there are significant benefits to just linking to graphics, or if you have really big graphics of a few hundred KB or more, think hard before doing only embedded graphics. You'll have some issues, including really really big documents. Consider working with the documents only on the network so that the graphics are there on the network too and you don't have path issues. You might want to link as you work with the document, then if necessary break the links (see the last section here) or even better, make a PDF, before distributing the document.

How to Insert Graphics in Documents so They're Not Linked

When you drag a graphic from the Gallery (Tools > Gallery) into your document, it's automatically embedded. But when you choose Insert > Picture > From File, then you can choose to link or to not. If you want the graphic embedded, then don't select Link.

How to Add Graphics to the Background of Headers, Footers, or Pages So They're Not Linked

You can just click in a header or footer and choose Insert > Picture > From File. But you can also set up headers, footers, and pages with a graphic in the background.

Choose Format > Page.

Click the Header, Footer, or Background tab.

For Headers or Footers click the More.

Then you'll see this window. Select Graphic then click Browse. Find the graphic. Again, just be sure you don't click the Link checkbox which in this case is next to the Browse button.

 

How to Un-Link (Embed) Graphics When They're Already In Your Document

Let's say you've got a document chock full of linked documents and you reallllly don't want to re-insert them. It's easy to fix; just break the link and the graphics will be embedded.

Under the Edit menu, look at Links. If it's dimmed as shown, then you don't have any linked graphics and you're good.

If it's not dimmed, then choose Edit > Links. In the Edit Links window, just select the graphics listed and choose Break Link. The graphics stay, but now they're embedded and you can mail the document wherever you want or store it in another location.

(You could also select a graphic link and choose Modify to change where it's pointing to.)

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Printing handouts in OpenOffice.org Impress (repost)

Note: See also a related article I wrote for TechTarget.com on creating presentations in OpenOffice.org 2.0.

Printing handouts is a little more complicated than it needs to be.

Here's the quick description. With a presentation open,  choose File > Print, then click the Options button. In the upper-left Contents quadrant of the Printer Options window, make sure only the Handouts option is marked. Then click OK and print from the Print window.

Here's the full answer, however, to how to print handouts from soup to nuts in 1.x and 2.0 versions of the software.

 

Printing Handouts, 2 to 6 to a page, in OpenOffice.org 1.x and StarOffice 7 and before
First, create your presentation and get it how you want it.

Specifying the Number of Slides Per Page

Choose View > Master > Handout or click the Handout View icon on the right side of the work area.

You'll see the layout window where you can see how many slides you'll have on  a page.

Choose Format > Modify Layout. You'll see the Modify Slide window where you can change the number of slides on a page. Select a different number if you want and click OK.

Setting Up and Formatting Handouts

The default page layout is Landscape. If you want Portrait (vertical), choose Format > Page and select Portrait, then click OK.

 

Back in the main layout window, drag the slide placeholders to different locations if you want to change where they are.

If you want horizontal lines for people to take notes on, you'll need to use the line tool to draw a set of 3-4 lines by the first slide yourself. To make them even after you've drawn them, select them all and choose Alignment > Right (or Left, or Center).  Click the image to see a bigger version if you want.

To distribute them evenly after you've drawn them, select them all and choose Distribution. Choose Vertical and Center. Then copy that group of lines when they're how you want them (might want to group them first), and copy the lines to the other slides on the page.

When you're done, it should look something like this.

If you want a page number at the bottom of each piece of paper (not every slide), use the Text tool to draw a text box at the bottom of the page, and type the word page if you want. Then choose Insert > Fields > Page Number to add an automatically incrementing page number.

Printing Handouts

Now that you've done the setup, you're ready to print.

Choose File > Print.

Click the Options button.

In the Contents section of the Printer Options window, make sure that only the Handouts option is selected.

The default is for Drawing to be selected and that's all. That means you get one big slide per page. You absolutely must select Handouts here to print handouts. If you leave Drawing selected, your printer will also spit out a printout of your presentation with one slide on every page.

Click OK in the Printer Options window to save the changes and close the window.

If you want to print just a subset of the pages, in the Print window, select the Pages option and type 1, 1-6, etc. The page count refers to slides, not pieces of paper. Also, if you want to print slides 1-6 and 13-18, you need to type a semicolon between the ranges, as in 1-6;13-18

That's all! That last part is the secret. Getting to the layout window was too complicated, and setting up the note-taking lines was a bit of a pain to do manually, though at least those lines will stay there now that you've done them. But the last part, marking Handouts, is the main tricky thing that is really hard to find.

Printing Handouts, 2 to 6 to a page, in OpenOffice.org 2.0 and StarOffice 8
It's a lot like printing handouts in 1.x. Read through that section if you haven't already. I'm going to go over the few differences here.

Specifying the Number of Slides Per Page

This is simpler and different than 1.x. In your open presentation, just click the Handouts tab above the slide view.

In the slide layout view that appears, you want to look to the right and find the Layouts tab.

Now choose the number of slides you want per page.

Setting Up and Formatting Handouts

This is the same as 1.x. See the 1.x setup and formatting section.

Printing Handouts

This is the same as 1.x. See the 1.x printing section. As before, be sure to select just the Handouts option in the Printer Options window.

 

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My article on transitioning to OpenOffice.org from Microsoft Office

I really thought that I had posted this article, but I have not seen it in a quick page through.

http://www.fanaticattack.com/2008/switching-office-suites-from-microsoft-office-to-openofficeorg.html

It is a big, big article with most of what I recommend about setting up and switching, with the primary focus on individual users. But it applies to transitioning groups, as well.

See also this blog post, which has some really specific info about how to distribute clip art to many users on a network.

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Big post with links to favorite entries

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.

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Searching and replacing for carriage returns, tabs, and other characters, using regular expressions

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.

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New book about a Medicare whistle-blower

My cousin's son-in-law book about his whistle-blowing experience is out today!

The title is Undercover and it's by John Schilling.

"When John Schilling, an unassuming mid-level accoun­tant, went to work for the Columbia Hospital Corporation, he never expected to become the catalyst for the series of "whistleblower" cases that ripped through the healthcare industry in the late 1990s. But when he unwittingly discovered that the company was siphoning billions of dollars away from Medicare and stealing from American taxpayers, he was faced with a choice: Speak up for what he believed to be right, or remain silent. Undercover tells the story of Schilling's harrowing journey from ordinary citizen to federal informant. The book recounts how Schilling allied himself with the FBI and the Justice Department and--unable to confide in friends or family--journeyed into an undercover world in which he carried a wire and mapped out offices for secret government raids. Suspenseful and provo­ca­tive, Undercover chronicles Schilling's nine-year ordeal that eventually led to the resignation of high-level executives and forced Columbia to return $1.7 billion dollars to the federal government. A compelling account of one man's decision to risk everything for the greater good, this book reveals the personal side of a thankless role that resulted, ultimately, in justice."

My family pretty much just has nice basic jobs, drinks coffee, and occasionally gets wild and crazy and organizes a family reunion. ;>  This is huge and amazing. I'm very excited, and I hope that anyone who likes to see justice triumph over power will enjoy reading it.

Sorting data in OpenOffice.org Calc (repost)

You want to do some good, hard sorting. Not just sorting by the first column, but by perhaps the third column. Maybe you want to sort first by state, then by city, then by last name. For that, you need the Sort window under Data > Sort.

You have your data.  Select all the data to sort, and either select the headings or not. You're good either way.

Choose Data > Sort.

Click the Options tab. You need to tell Calc whether you've got headings selected or not. If you've got headings selected, you want the option shown, "Range Contains Column Labels," to be selected. If you didn't, unmark it.

Now click the Sort Criteria tab. If you selected headings you'll see the headings themselves; if you didn't then you'll just see Column A, etc. Select the column to sort by, and Ascending or Descending.

Click OK.

You get your results. Here, the amounts under the column for the year 2000 are sorted in ascending order.

Now, let's look at a different set of data. You have a lot of people from the same state, and several cities per state. In this case you might want to just sort by last name, but you could also group by location. So you'd sort by state (the broadest category), then city, then alphabetically by last name. Click the image to see more detail.

Select the data, with or without headings, and choose Data > Sort. In the Options tab, be sure to select the Range Contains Column Labels option if you selected headings.

In the Sort Criteria tab, select first State, then City, then Last Name.

Click OK.

You get your results. Here's a closeup of one section, followed by the complete data. Click either to see them closeup.

This window that I've covered in this blog entry is pretty much what you need. If you want to go a little farther and sort by something else, like days of the week in the order they come, not alphabetical order, tune in for the next sorting blog.

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Direct book sales are on again

See this URL.

http://openoffice.blogs.com/bookresources/2008/04/ordering-the-op.html

Solveig

Some of my favorite OpenOffice.org features (repost)

(This is a repost of an older entry. The features are still the same, but the windows will look a little different in the current version.) 

 

Everyone's got their favorite features that make life easier, more fun, or both. Here are a few of my favorites.

Making PDFs Straight From OpenOffice.org

One of the greatest, most convenient features is the ability to make Adobe Acrobat PDFs from any OpenOffice.org document. Why is this cool? Because anyone can read a PDF document no matter what software they have (since everyone has the little program for reading PDFs). It’s the perfect way to send a document to someone else, if they don’t need to change your document.

Just click on the handy PDF icon on the top of your work area, give it a name and specify a location for the PDF file, and click Save. Then email that mydocument.pdf or quarterlyreport.pdf document.

If you want more control over the PDF, choose File > Export as PDF, name the file, then set options in the next window.

Send Document as Email

To make it even quicker, choose File > Send > Document as PDF Attachment. That starts your mail program, creates a new mail document, AND attaches a PDF of your current document to that email. It really doesn’t get much slicker.

Or if you don't need a PDF, just choose File > Send > Document as Email.

Paste Icon for Inter-Text-Document Pasting

When you're pasting from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org, or from OpenOffice.org 2.0 to OpenOffice.org 1.x, you're not going to get text. You're going to get a frame of text or an icon object.

What I've done to get around this is to use Notepad as an intermediary. But it's a whole lot easier to use OpenOffice.org's multiple paste format features. Either choose Edit > Paste Special and choose unformatted or formatted text, or just click on the paste icon and choose your option. Formatted Text (RTF) usually works just fine.

Make the Icons a Decent Size

Choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org (or StarOffice) > View and make sure the icons are large enough. I like to see my icons, not squint at them.

The List Object Bar and the List Formatting Window

I used to curse the indenting and levels of OpenOffice.org lists until I started using the specialized object bar. Choose View > Toolbars > Bullets and Numbering, or just make a list and the floating one pops up.

Also, when you're developing complex list formatting, always use the numbering/bullets formatting window (Format > Bullets and Numbering) and use only the last two tabs, Options and Positioning. These are the only tabs that let you specify specific formatting that's different for each level.

Make Shortcuts

This was in my configuration blog too but I really like it. The same tab where you turned off word completion (Tools > AutoCorrect, Replace) 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.

Just choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click on the Replace tab. 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. Click New, then click OK. In your document, type the shortcut, followed by a space, and your word will appear.

Making My Own Color and Other Fills

I might be pickier than most about the color I want for drawings, but for one thing, I don't like the greens that come with OpenOffice.org. Too dark or too limey. So I make my own.

Choose File > New > Drawing, then choose Format > Area and click the Color tab. Or just choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org (or StarOffice) > Colors.

Click Edit and fiddle til you have the color you want.

Click OK, then type a new name in the main color field and click Add. The new color now shows up in all color lists including the font color lists.

Following the navigation for doing this in Draw, you can make your own gradients, hatches, and bitmaps in the same window.

3D Shapes

In Draw and in Writer, you can use the 3D shapes to, well, draw 3D shapes. Even better, you can make them intersect. Draw two shapes, select one, cut it, select the other one, press F3, and paste. Then move them together.

 

To change their orientation, click on each shape once to get green handles, then again to get red handles, and swivel them around.

I'm not sure how useful this is to everyone but it sure is cool.

You can also convert any item to 3D, in Draw. Choose File > New > Drawing and create any shape, even text. Then right-click on the shape and choose Convert > To 3D. Shazam.

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