OpenOffice Writer for students by David Paenson, B. A. Hons.
IMPRESSUM I first wrote this guide in the summer of 2008 in German for students of the Department of Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences in Frankfurt, Germany. Questions and answers over the years have all found their way into this guide, which I continuously update and have now for the first time translated into English. Any comments and criticisms are welcome and will be taken account of in future releases of this document. Please write to: paenson@fb4.fhfrankfurt.de.
CONTENTS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Introduction 1 Automation 1 Document structure 2 First Steps 3 Headings 3 Chapter numbering 5 Navigating through your text 7 Group Work 8 Table of Contents 9 Paragraph style “Text Body” 11 More on Styles 13 MS-Word 13 Unnumbered pages 14 Title page 16 Numbered Default Page 17 Literature List 19 Bullets and Numbering 19 Cross-references 20 Footnotes 22 Quotes 23 Line Numbering 24 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 T
1 Introduction I first wrote this short guide in the summer of 2008 (in German) and have been updating it ever since. My aim is to help students over the typical hurdles they invariably come up against as soon as they are confronted with the task of writing lengthy documents – especially their thesis. So my aim is precisely not to detail all the numerous functions OpenOffice Writer has in store, but instead to focus on typical real life situations from the point of view of the student.
3 Document Structure When conceiving an essay or thesis you will invariably have in your mind’s eye not only its con tents but also its overall structure. The contents consist in the main of the actual text. It is the text body which makes up the bulk of the document. The Text Body has its own formatting style, appropriately called just that: “Text Body”. But we will go into that in more detail in section 10. For now we want to deal with the structure of a document.
4 First Steps When embarking on a new text you will invariably pose yourself the question: should I con centrate 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.
Style Font Size Typeface Spacing above Spacing below Chapter headings (level 1) Garamond 16pt Bold 1.6 cm 0.8 cm Section headings (level 2) Garamond 13pt Bold Italic 1.2 cm 0.6 cm Subsection headings (level 3) Garamond 13pt Italic 0.8 cm 0.
immediately following it do not get added together; instead only the larger of the two spacings takes effect • Add paragraph and table spacing at tops of pages; unchecking this op tion ensures that headings appear right at the top the page, without the usual set spa cing separating them from a previous paragraph • Expand word space on lines with manual line breaks in justified paragraphs; unchecking this option ensures that inserting a new line using shortcut Shift + Return will not expand the words on
When using 1, 2, 3 style it is com mon to Show sublevels. This means that heading 5.2.7 for instance will appear exactly as “5.2.7” and not simply as “7”. When mixing styles, you could have level 2 with sublevels shown (for instance “5.2”), but leave level 3 without showing sublevels (just “c)” for instance).
Wordy Headings? Try to avoid headings that span more than one line. If a heading needs added explanation, let a short paragraph immediately following the heading take care of that. Long headings are also a problem in the table of contents. Several Headings in Succession? It’s not a good idea to have for example a 5.2 immediately followed by a 5.2.1. At least a short paragraph explaining what 5.2 is all about should be inserted in between.
8 Group Work More and more students have to give in group papers. Up to four or even more authors might be involved.
• go back to your document and place the cursor at the very end of the last piece of text belonging to the whole group • go to menu Insert › Manual Break and choose the newly created Style “Leila” (see illustra tion 8) • place cursor in Leilas Page Header and write her name, press the tabulator one or two times to move the cursor to the right margin and Insert › Fields › Page Number Illustration 8: Choose your newly created page style "Leila" Correcting Other People’s Texts You will probably want so
Alignment As you can see in illustration 11, the table of contents by default contains the following four entries: • Chapter number: E# • Entry: E • Tab stop (usually right aligned and with dots as filling): T • Page number: # Illustration 10: Setting the amount of indenting needed in "Contents 1"-style So as to achieve an even align ment as in illustration 9 you add a Tab stop in between the E# and the E, leaving the Tab stop position at 0.
the second and subsequent lines of the entry will all appear below each other and not below the number of the entry. Note also that when choosing your indentation it’s better to go for generous values. If you choose too small values, then your numbering won’t fit in and you will find your right dotted tab will appear before the entry instead of between entry and page num ber.
and table text. For the latter you simply wouldn’t want a Line spacing of 1.5 lines, Alignement justified and Text flow › Hyphenation › Automatically. Styles can be arranged hierarchically, the one inheriting its settings from the other and thus building a kind of dependency tree, though dependencies can be broken at any point, allowing for full flexibility. 11 More on Styles We have already applied paragraph styles for headings and for the text body.
12 MS-Word I absolutely recommend not using Microsoft Word. We all know how popular MS Word is, al most everybody has it though not necessarily bought it. Some people will argue, “Well, you must use it, because it’s the ‘standard’.” Or they might say: “Well, you know, later on in my work place I will probably have to use it, so I might as well get used to it now.
13 Unnumbered Pages Problem: You 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. All you need are two page styles – the Default page style with activated header or footer to accomodate the page number, and a First Page style with no header or footer.
Illustration 15: Here an example with two simple page breaks followed by a manual page break to switch from First Page Style to Default Style and restart numbering beginning with 1 Separate Document for the First Page? Now that you’ve seen how easy it is to insert simple page breaks using Ctrl + Return as well as to switch page styles and restart numbering using Manual Page Breaks it is quite obvious you don’t need separate documents for the different parts of your text.
Papers Without Title Page For short papers, say 6 to 10 pages, you will probably not need a title page.
There are a few things you can do to make the header look nicer such as adding a line between header and text: go to menu Format › Styles and Formatting, choose the 4th icon for Page styles, select Modify, go to the tab Header and then press More. Other important page settings pertain to the margins. Click on the tab Page and set the mar gins to the following values: 3cm for Left margin (to make room for perforation), and 2cm for all other margins.
your newly created Roman style page, these will appear as expected as “i, ii, iii, …”. The Table of contents will also display Roman numbers for these pages. This is basically the same method we already came across in section 8 on Group Work when you wanted unique Headers for each member of the work group. Note: OpenOffice insists on making any page with an uneven page number into a right page just like in any magazine.
17 Bullets and Numbering Listings can be really nerve wracking. You write a “1.” at the beginning of a paragraph, write some text and then press Return, and off you go: an indented list gets launched and you have no idea how to get out of it. So out of sheer exasperation under the menu Tools you go to AutoCorrect Options › Options and uncheck the box Apply numbering – sym bol: * and the programme stops bothering you. That is actually a pity, because this automation can make life easier, not more difficult.
… and to insert a new line without creating a new paragraph simply press Shift + Return 4. just pressing a simple Return will resume numbering where last left off 18 Cross-References During the winter semester of 2010 two students came along with an extremely voluminous thesis. Though their greatest worry was not so much the main text as their 300 page annex, consisting of many interviews they had conducted.
19 Footnotes You add a footnote from the menu Insert › Footnote/Endnote › Automatic. This way the programme takes care of numbering automatically. Even if you move footnotes around, their numbering will be automatically updated. On the whole it’s best to do without footnotes. You might want to use them to point to fur ther reading or arguments by other authors, which you don’t want to deal with directly in your main text. For this endnotes might be a better solution than footnotes.
20 Quotes Short quotes need “double quotation marks” to set them off from the rest of the text. Longer ones need a paragraph of their own – usually indented and possibly in slightly smaller font size. If you have a line spacing of 1.5 for your Body Text, you might want to choose a slightly smaller one of say 130% for your quotes. Ellipsis in square brackets: […] are used as a stand-in for left-out parts of your quote. Marx, in a footnote to chapter 31 of Capital, Vol. 1 quotes a certain T. J.
especially controversial or difficult to interpret or even in contradiction with other statements by the same author, then you do want to quote the passage in question. 21 Line Numbering Line Numbering comes in handy for interviews. 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 fifth line. Lastly, you might possibly want numbering to restart from 1 at the top of a page.
Other decisions which you can take are if you want the table to be “splittable” in case of a page break. Whereas it is advisable not to split very small tables containing only a few lines, you would in case of a table with a large number of lines want to Allow table to split across pages and columns so that it can overflow onto the following page. In this case you would also want the first (title) line(s) to be repeated on each page by ticking the box next to Repeat Heading.
23 Charts We can present the same information contained in Table 3 in the shape of a Chart as in illus tration 24. Here is how to go about it: 1. mark the whole table using mouse and press Ctrl + c in order to copy its contents to computer memory 2. in the Button Toolbar click on the arrow point ing downward next to the symbol for New File and choose Spreadsheet (see illustration 22) 3. in your empty spreadsheet insert the contents of computer memory using Ctrl + v 4.
area and choose Format Chart Area; under the tab Area you can choose a col our, and under the tab Transparency you can make it lighter by applying say 80%; on the whole, light colours are better, especially if you are printing on a transparency 12. don’t forget to add a caption using a right click 13.
24 Snapshot Illustration 25 on potential reasons for slipping into poverty is not a diagram taken directly from the internet using a right click. Rather it is part of a larger page, in fact a PDF document, so no right clicking on it is going to be of any use. Instead you need to position the document Illustration 25: Source: Sozialbericht Nordrhein-Westfalen 2004, S. 205, http://www.mags.nrw.
Again, don’t forget to give all your pictures a Caption, so you can easily refer to them from within your text (Cross-reference) and have them added to your table of illustrations. 26 Cross Tables (Statistics) OpenOffice Calc is not in the league of a specialised Sex Level of rejection in % statistics programme like SPSS or Stata. Nevertheless F 81.4 M 34.0 you can use it for statistical purposes, one of the most Total Result 61.7 popular being Cross Tables.
10.
Illustration 28: The number of decimal places is reduced to 1 3. Drag & Drop the button “Sex” onto the white area Row Fields 4. Drag & Drop the button “Handedness” onto the white area Column Fields and also onto the white area Data Fields 5. under Options choose Count instead of Sum 6. copy the resulting Cross Table back into your text; it should look something like in il lustration 29 7.
Count - Handedness Sex F M Total Result Handedness L 1 3 4 R 6 2 8 Total Result 7 5 12 Illustration 29: Distribution of handedness between men and women Count - Handedness Sex F M Total Result Handedness L 14.29% 60.00% 33.33% R 85.71% 40.00% 66.67% Total Result 100.00% 100.00% 100.00% Illustration 30: Same result as above, but this time expressed in "% of row" 27 Extra Long Web Addresses Web addresses tend to get longer by the day.
28 Fonts Fonts play an important role in making the text more readable. There are millions of them around, but two main categories always come up as alternatives for Text Body. On the one hand there are the Serif Fonts, then you have the Sans Serif Fonts. The Serif Fonts are characterized by semi-structural details at the tips of some of the strokes. These have the effect of reducing the optical gaps between letters, thus making them to a de gree “fuse together”.
Some teachers – at least over here in Germany – insist on very detailed specifications so as to force students to produce only a certain amount of text. Instead of saying: “Please write 10,000 to 12,000 characters, they specify font size, font type, margins and number of pages. This is really an unfortunate misuse of formatting for control purposes. Combinations such as “P. 145”, “§ 33a”, “$ 120” and so on can be a nuisance.
30 Special Characters To insert Special Characters, go to menu Insert › Special Character. If you need a particular character or even a complete string of characters very often, say “[…]”, and don’t want to keep on typing the sequence out, you can mark it once, go to Tools › AutoCor rect Options and type in on the left hand side under Replace a simple sequence of simple letters such as “xxx”. Then press New and confirm with OK. Now your off.
• Ctrl + f find or replace text • Ctrl + c copy marked text to computer memory • Ctrl + v insert contents of computer memory • Ctrl + shift + v same as above, only you can choose to insert text without format ting • Ctrl + x cut out and move marked text to computer memory • Ctrl + Return start a new page • Shift + Return start a new line (but not a new paragraph) • Ctrl + - insert an optional hyphen – the word will be hyphenated here only if re quired • Ctrl + Shift + Space insert a non-b
much better; this example specifies the kind of document (essay), the subject (child poverty), the name of the professor you are writing for (brown), your own name (marie) and the latest version number (05); also store your files in appropriate subdir ectories (/uni, /personal etc.
37 Synonyms Under Tools › Language › Thesaurus (Ctrl + F7) the programme lists quite a few alternatives. If you want more, go to woxikon.de. 38 Document Infos Sometimes you might want to store general information about your file, such as author names. To do this, go to File › Properties › Description/Custom Properties. Also you might want statistical information on your file, such as number of words or number of char acters. Choose the tab Statistics for that.
Return twice to leave an empty line before inserting your last Database Field, which is “City”; the other fields (Telephone, Mobile and Mail) are of no interest to you for the purpose of your bulk mail; now comes the difficult part, which is the actu al formatting; the sizes listed in the following table are OK for an A4 sized paper con taining 3 x 8 labels – but keep in mind you might have to fiddle a bit with these para meters because it depends partly on the way your printer handles the sheets of pap
• Mark the whole text and apply the paragraph style Text Body ( Ctrl + 0). While text remains marked and to make absolutely sure that all manual formatting is definitely re moved go to menu Format › Default Formatting or press Ctrl + m. • Now modify your paragraph style Text Body in following respects: increase line spa cing to 1.5 lines, change alignment to Justified, activate automatic Hyphenation (under tab Text Flow) as well as Orphan and Widow Control.
42 Three Taboos • Avoid empty lines. Any spacing must be done using paragraph styles. • No two consecutive spaces. • Don’t manually format text – always use styles.
