LibreOffice Writer Advanced Topics

Formatting sets the attributes for a portion of a document.

Attributes for text might include: font family; font style; font size; font color.

Attributes for a paragraph might include: indentation; line spacing; borders; padding.

Attributes for an image might include: position; padding; wrap.

These are just a few examples of attributes for a few items in a document. There are many more.

Direct formatting concentrates of what something looks like. Direct formatting involves setting attributes individually.

Styles emphasize what something is. What it is determines its looks like overall. Styles apply numerous attributes at one time, applying the same attributes each time the style is employed.

Styles make formatting more efficient. Styles also aid in consistency of appearance.

Most people have come to employ a limited use of styles. But these styles are usually mixed with direct formatting. This is understandable since many toolbars combine both features of styles and direct formatting.

Mixing styles and direct formatting often leads to problems, especially if you are try to change the looks of a document. It is often hard to tell what if causing a portion of text to appear the way it does.

There are methods of dealing with such issues, but these usually become tedious and time consuming.

It usually takes less time to set up the styles you will need for a document than it does to correct problems later. This is especially true when dealing with larger documents.

The equipment you use may influence how your work.

Working with a separate keyboard and mouse while viewing your work on a large monitor — or even two monitors — usually offers more opportunities to increase efficiency and workflow.

Using a laptop computer can offer greater portability if you must work in various places.

When working on a laptop, you may need to modify how your screen appears in order to allow more room to view your document. You may also need to learn more keyboard shortcuts or even create keyboard shortcuts yourself.

Page styles are the foundation upon which a document is built. Every page has a page style. This may be the Default Page Style or it may be another page style offered by LibreOffice Writer.

The page style determines such things as page size, borders, whether a page displays headers or footers, whether a page displays a background, and what page style a following page will have.

LibreOffice Writer offers a variety of page styles that can be used as is or be modified. You can, also, create your own page styles for your document.

Character styles are used to apply attributes to individual characters, words, or groups of words within a paragraph.

Rather than manually applying italics, bolding, and a different font color to certain words throughout your document, you can just apply a single character style. Later, if you want to add underlining to all of these instances, you can add this attribute to the character style once rather than scrolling through your document and changing each instance separately.

Use of character styles aids in developing greater consistency throughout a document.

Lists created using the Formatting toolbar are not the same as list styles.

Learning about list styles helps you better understand the relationship between the various styles LibreOffice Writer offers.

List styles depend on character styles for their bullets, numbers, or letters.

List styles define properties such as indentation, numbering style, and punctuation after the number or symbol. They do not define properties such as font, borders, text flow, and so on.

Lists items are paragraphs. You can apply list styles within the paragraph style dialog. Once set up, you can use paragraph styles to create lists without the need to go to list styles directly.

Understanding the relationship between character styles, list styles, and paragraph styles will help you set up a paragraph style to use for making a list in your document. If you later want to change the looks of your list, you will know which of the three styles to change to get the results you want in all lists in your document using this list style.

You may save yourself frustration if you learn how LibreOffice Writer applies sequential numbering to ordered lists.

It is also important to understand how adjust the settings on the Position tab of the List Styles dialog so your numbers line up as you would like.

Frame styles are a versatile and powerful feature found in LibreOffice Writer.

It is important to understand that you do not use the Frame Styles section of the Sidebar to insert frame styles into your document. But you can use this section to assign a specific style to frames you create.

Table Styles are a special category of styles in LibreOffice Writer.

You do not use the Table Styles section of the Sidebar when creating tables in your document. But you can use this section to assign a specific style to tables you've inserted into your document using other methods.

If you design a table the way you want all of your tables to look, you should create a new table style so you don't need to design each table individually.

Unlike other styles you create, table styles you create will not only be available in the current document. Custom table styles will automatically become available in other documents

With the exception of table styles, any styles you modify or create in a document will normally be available only in that document. Still, you don't need to recreate your styles each time you start a new document.

You can use styles you create in new documents if you save these styles in a custom template. You can even use these styles in documents you've already created once you learn how to reassign other templates to current documents.

You can create your own paragraph styles with names more descriptive than the generic Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3 styles LibreOffice Writer offers by default. You can use these styles in the same way as heading styles including as entries in a table of contents.

You don't need use a generic table of contents for your document. Nor do you need to manually insert a table of contents to get the look you like. LibreOffice Writer provides many features for designing a table of contents to look the way you want, both in a Writer document and when you export the document to PDF.

You can create your own custom heading paragraph styles that are more descriptive than the generic Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3 styles LibreOffice Writer offers by default. You can even set the style you create to automatically begin on a new page.

Understanding paragraph style hierarchy can simplify the process of creating various custom heading styles.

Many people are unaware of what LibreOffice Writer's Navigator has to offer.

Among other things, the Navigator provides an easy way to jump to specific areas of a document. You are not limited to headings. You can jump to specific images, tables, or other objects in the document.

Learning how to set up your objects and change the view in the Navigator can save you a lot of time scrolling, especially in longer documents.

You can use the Navigator in LibreOffice Writer to rearrange parts of your document.

You can move parts of the document before or after other parts.

You can, also, use the Navigator to change the level of a heading. But it is importance to understand how shifting the level of one portion of the document can affect other portions connected to it.

Outline folding is an advanced feature available in newer versions of LibreOffice Writer. This feature may need to be enabled before it can be used.

Outline folding allows you to hide certain areas of a document so you can more easily concentrate on other areas.

Images can add interest as well as additional information to a document. Learning how to insert, size, and position images properly can save you a lot of trouble, especially if you later add or remove text earlier in the document.

LibreOffice Writer offers many options for creating and changing the looks of charts. The Chart Type dialog alone offers over 150 different looks you can give to a chart.

Writer also provides a Data Table feature where you can insert information to be used in the chart.

Once the basic chart is produced, you can customize it even more.

Tables provide a useful way to add additional information to a Writer document. A well-designed table can display information in a way that is easy to understand.

Data for a table may be linked to or embedded into the document.

A table can be entered directly into the document or inserted within a frame for greater versatility in page layout.

A sidebar is a block of text that appears beside a larger article. It relates to, expands on, or adds value to the article itself.

Sidebars can be inserted into a document through the use of frames. You can style the text, images, and other items in the sidebar the same way you would in the main article.

Quotations are normally part of the main text of a document. They may be considered additional information when they take the form of long quotations from another source.

A custom paragraph style provides a great way to design such a quote and give the same look to similar quotes elsewhere in the document.

Warnings, cautions, and tips are supplementary information often included in documents.

You can use various methods to create a special design and even give a standard image to each type of notice.

Sections in LibreOffice Writer are blocks of text with special attributes and formatting. Sections can be used for various purposes.

One such use is to insert information from another document.

You might want to leave comments in a document as a reminder to yourself to do something at a later time. You could compare these to sticky notes in a physical document.

You can also use comments when collaborating with others. The color of the notes and other details will indicate who wrote a particular comment.

Comments may be included when printing the document or exporting to PDF.

You may not want to use comments if you have limited screen space, because comments appear outside the page.

Instead, you could temporarily reduce the width of you page area and make comments in the margin using frame styles.

One of the simplest ways to track changes is to save your document under a different name each time you make major changes.

You can compare two saved documents by opening one. Then, go to Edit>Track Changes>Compare Document… and select an earlier document to compare it with. Colored text, underlining, and strike throughs indicate differences.

A Manage Changes dialog helps you make decisions what text to use.

The Track Changes features in LibreOffice Writer can be useful when several people are collaborating on a project.

Writer's Protect Track Changes feature which allows a password to be used, can prevent a reviewer from turning off the Record Track Changes feature that can be set in a document.

Track Changes Comments can be inserted to indicate why a change is suggested.

The Find and Replace feature in LibreOffice Writer can prove very useful when you want to change a word in your document. Knowing what options are offered can prevent finding words that aren't what you are specifically looking for.

But the Find and Replace feature is not limited to finding and replacing works.

People often spend more time looking for a template for their page design than it would take to design their own page.

Learning how elements of a page work together and interact with each other is a powerful skill.

The page style dialog is the place to begin when designing a document.

Columns are useful for keeping lines of text short. Short lines enable readers to move more easily from the end of one row to the beginning of the next.

Placing columns within sections makes it easier to distribute text evenly over several columns.

Frames may be used to form columns on a page.

Knowing various methods to accomplish a task like forming columns provides you with choices. You can, then, select the best choice for the current situation.

Combining tables and sections provides still another way to set columns of text off from other elements on a page.

By default, tables take up the whole width of the text area of a page. This is true even if the table displayed requires only a portion of this width.

This lesson presents a way to flow text around the table, filling the area beside the table.

Adjusting the space between one line of text an another can make the text easier to read. The amount of space required depends, in part, on the font size and the font being used.

Another aspect of line spacing comes in trying to align rows of text in one column with rows of text in the next column.

Text in LibreOffice Writer documents automatically flows from one page to the next when using the same page style.

You can, also, set up a page style to switch to another page style when the text flows from one page to the next such as going from a right page to a left page in a bound document.

There are times, however, when you must insert a manual page break.

Bound documents require different page styles for left and right pages.

Setting up even more page styles allows for even more versatility without requiring a lot of manual formatting.

The benefit of employing more page styles becomes even more apparent if you change the content of your document.

The looks of headers and footers are determined by the page style employed. Changing the looks of a header or footer on one page will change the looks of the header or footer on every page using that page style although the actual contents may vary.

Employing fields saves a lot of work when dealing with the content of headers an footers.

LibreOffice Writer provides various tools for setting up and using footnotes.

This lesson will teach you where footnote settings are located and what they do.

Footnotes can appear in sections as well as at the bottom of a page. These footnotes may use the same numbering system as those at the bottom of the page or a different numbering system.

A page layout should be designed around the idea of how a reader will view the page.

When a document will be read on a mobile device such as a smart phone, the page layout should be different from that of a document designed to be read on a large computer monitor or in a printed page.

LibreOffice Writer provides a way to add horizontal lines to your document. Creating your own paragraph styles to insert horizontal lines provides an easy way to add a variety of different lines.

Special characters are characters provided by fonts for which keyboards have no key.

LibreOffice Writer provides a way to insert these keys into your document. It also provides methods to make it easier to insert characters you commonly use.

LibreOffice Writer provides a Gallery making it easy to add various items such as graphics and customizable images to your documents.

You can also add links in the Gallery to your own commonly used graphics so you don't have to search your file system each time you want to use them.

You can use paragraph styles to add drop caps to your document. The Paragraph Style dialog provides a variety of settings to adjust the appearance of the drop cap.

You can use an image to enhance the appearance of a drop cap and provide more choices in its placement.

For a wider selection of design choices, choose frames over text boxes when designing pull quotes.

Frame styles allow you to apply multiple attributes at one time and make it easier to give a uniform appearance to pull quotes throughout the document.

You can design custom colors in LibreOffice Writer. You can save these and any other colors you use regularly to a custom palette to make finding them easier.

LibreOffice Writer offers you the ability to easily add captions to images in your documents.

You can customize these captions and add automatic numbering that will adjust if images are added, removed, or moved.

The process you use when styling images and captions may have surprising results. But that doesn't mean you can't get the look you want.

By default, LibreOffice Writer assigns hyperlinks to entries in tables of contents. You can decide whether you want to use this feature and how any hyperlinks appear.

You can decide whether Writer automatically inserts a hyperlink when you type a web address or email address.

There are also other uses for hyperlinks in Writer documents.

Manually typed cross-references to other parts of a document can become outdated if you change the position of the target.

LibreOffice Writer offers automatic cross-references to solve this problem.

Creating an accurate index for a document can be time consuming, but LibreOffice Writer can help you with this process.

LibreOffice Writer helps automate the process of including a concordance to your document.

After using Writer's automated process, you can refine the looks of the results.

LibreOffice Writer providers features for making it easier to include a customized bibliography in your document. Like tables of contents, a bibliography can be updated if changes are later made to the document text.

The information of a simple bibliography is stored in the document file itself.

LibreOffice Writer also provides a way to set up a bibliography database that can be used for multiple documents.

Larger documents such as books often show page numbers on some pages and not on others (such as blank pages or the first page of a chapter).

Front matter may have a different numbering style such as small Roman numerals instead of the Arabic numbers used in the main text body.

LibreOffice Writer provides methods to do such things without needing to resort to manually entering the page numbers.

Creating a business letter template with fields will allow you to quickly write business letters without needing to insert common information such as the company name, location, and an image of the company logo.

Place holders can be used to indicate what information you should include and where.

Besides just saving time, such a template will provide a more consistent look to a company's correspondence.

LibreOffice Writer offers features to create and print multiple copies of a document that used standardized text combined with variable information.

You can use the mail merge process to produce form letters, mailing labels, envelopes, or similar documents.

Customized and printed business envelopes give a professional look to correspondence.

Creating a template for this purpose makes the process easier and assures a more uniform look to business envelopes.

Printing directly on envelopes presents a more professional look to correspondence.

Larger envelopes and packages, however, generally call for the use of labels.

There may be times when you want to add decorations to your document as opposed to simply inserting images.

LibreOffice Writer offers special toolbars to help with this process.

LibreOffice Writer offers features to help you create forms which you can distribute for the recipient to fill out in an interactive manner.

You can even include a submit button that will activate the recipient's email client and initiate an email with some areas already filled in and the form included as an attachment.

LibreOffice Writer helps you create a master document that links to other documents.

This feature may be useful when including individual documents as part of a larger document.