Intro to OpenOffice.org Styles
- Introduction and Getting Started
- Paragraph Styles
- Working with Paragraph Styles
- Working with Page Styles
- Finishing Up
Introduction
Most people use a Word Processor as a glorified typewriter - a typewriter where you can change the fonts, add pictures/graphics and possibly add a table or two - they just start typing away, highlighting words or paragraphs, then changing the font-family, font-size or font-weight for what they highlight. This is a very inefficient and time-consuming way to create documents using a computer. Not only that, it also forces you to focus on how the page looks instead of actually focusing on the content of the document.
Unfortunately, too many educators focus on the vast amount of features in Microsoft Word and forget the big picture of creating a document quickly and easily. They forget one thing - "Knowing how to run Microsoft Word does not make you an Author, the years and years spent in language classes and your God given talent make you an Author." A word processor is simply a tool that allows you to express and show your talent, a tool that unfortunately too many talented people simply use as a glorified typewriter.
This guide is designed to show you how to easily implement styles so you can quickly create a paper by concentrating on the content and not how it looks. We will be using the text of the United States Constitution, cleaning it up and assigning styles to different parts of the text. Later we will add Page styles, add a table of content, a footer and show you how to easily add a footnote.
To complete this tutorial you will need to download the text of the United States Constitution. You can find it at the following Internet sites: (right-click and save link as...)
http://www.pcc-services.com/files/misc/const.txt
http://files.pcc-services.com/files/misc/const.txt
This tutorial is written for OpenOffice.org Writer, however it could probably be easy to adapted for Microsoft Word (except for the page styles since Word does not offer an equivalent function). The images shown are from OpenOffice.org Writer running on Microsoft Windows XP, although the functionality is basically the same whether you are running OpenOffice.org on Windows, Mac OSX or Linux. I used screenshots from Windows XP since (currently) most desktops are running Microsoft Windows.
Getting Started
To begin this tutorial simply open OpenOffice.org Writer, if you are currently in another document, simply click on File -> New -> Text Document.
Saving the File
Whenever you are creating a new document using any type of word processor, the first thing you should do is save the file to your computer. You do this by simply clicking on the save button within the toolbar, clicking File -> Save or clicking File -> Save As.
Saving the Document before Starting
Saving the file first is a very good habit to get into, it allows you to simply click on the save button to manually save the file, it allows the application to automatically save the file at certain intervals, and if something were to happen to the computer while writing a document it gives you a specific filename to recover.
Creating the Metadata
Once the file is saved, you should probably adjust the "Metadata" of the file, Metadata is simply the "Data about the Data" where you can insert the Title, Subject, etc. You can find this "Metadata" by clicking on File -> Properties.
Adjusting the Title Metadata
As you can see, you can set various information regarding your document. For this tutorial, we are going to insert the title of the Document as "The United States Constitution" and are going to add a custom field called "Authors".
Creating a Custom Field called Authors
You can add custom fields by going to the "User Defined" tab and clicking on the "Info Fields" button. This will open a dialog box where you can modify the different User Configurable fields. For this tutorial, create a field called "Authors", close the dialog box by clicking on "OK". Then set the newly created Authors field to "Delegates Attending the Constitutional Convention 1787".
Setting the Custom Field "Authors"
Importing the Constitution
Now that we entered all of the Metadata that we will utilize for this tutorial, it is time to import the entire text of the United States Constitution into our document. There are various different ways of importing text into OpenOffice.org, you can open the file directly, you can select the text with another application, then copy and paste it into OpenOffice.org, or you can use the Insert -> File dialog function, this is what we will use here.
So, select Insert -> File and the File Selector dialog used by your Operating System will open. Now simply locate the const.txt file you should have downloaded and hit "open". Depending on your Operating System, the text will either be inserted, or a dialog box will appear giving you more options. This dialog might appear if you are on a non-Unix based Operating System since the text file was created on a GNU/Linux system - this is due to the fact the different ways carriage returns are handled within the Operating System. Anyway, if you receive the dialog box, simply hit OK.
ASCII Filter Options Dialog Box
