Openoffice 4 Guide For Students
Openoffice 4 Guide For Students
Openoffice 4 Guide For Students
Writer
for students
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. Please forward comments and
criticisms to: [email protected]. This introduction covers version 4.1 of Apache
OpenOffice (for Windows, Linux and Mac).
CONTENTS
1
Introduction
27 Tables
Theory
28 Charts
Document Structure
29 Pictures
First Steps
30 Snapshots
Headings
Chapter Numbering
Table of Contents
Outline
34 Fonts
Navigator
35 Emphasis
10 Group Work
36 Special Characters
11 Proofreading
12 Text Body
38 Shortcut keys
13 Style basics
39 Mouse Clicks
14 Reusing styles
40 PDFs
15 MS-Word
17 Title Page
44 Spell Check
19 Default Page
45 Synonyms
46 Document Infos
22 Line Numbering
48 Help
23 Cross-References
24 Footnotes
50 Basic Practice
25 Bibliography
51 Extra Practice
26 Quotes
Introduction
This guide is intended for university students. It covers all the essentials you will need during
the course of your studies.
But before reading on please do the hands-on exercise in section 50 right now. Then come back
and take up from here. This way the following explanations will have a practical basis, consid erably speeding up the learning process. Note that you must read the entire guide, because the
various sections are based one on the other, making it pointless to jump directly to those you
might consider especially useful. It should take approximately four hours to read through this
whole documentation.
Theory
Your thesis like every other 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.
Chapter
number
Section
Heading
Main Chapter
with continuous line
above and lots of
space below
Body Text
Footnotes
Footer with
Continuous
line
Page Number
in Footer
On the basis of this information the table of contents and other tables will be generated auto matically.
These various settings are all recorded once only and will henceforth apply to the whole docu ment independently of its length.
Document Structure
When conceiving an essay or thesis you will invariably have in your minds eye not only its contents 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. We will go into that in
in section 12.
For now we want to deal with the structure of a document. The main means to make the
underlying structure visible for the reader is the use of chapter headings. Your text will have
an implicit structure independently of any headings anyway, but its the headings which make
this structur explicit.
Any text will at least have main chapter headings, that is Level 1. But quite often you might
need Level 2 section headings even Level 3 subsection headings. OpenOffice allows for
10 levels.
These various Levels are optically distinguishable one from the other by:
typeface (regular/bold/italic)
numbering (optional)
Its best to type in all the headings and sub-headings right from the start and activate their
automatic numbering too. That way you have a structure which you can then fill in little by
little with text.
Once you have the headings you can then automatically generate a table of contents.
Note: The decision what is a heading and what it should look like are two separate decisions.
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
shouldnt apply them systematically right from the start. Here some of the advantages of this
way of going about things:
speed
you can jump directly to any chapter without scrolling (see section 9 on the Navigator)
youll know exactly what the final result will look like
Headings
As mentioned above you have to tell the programme what is a Heading and what is Text Body.
For that you use the following keyboard shortcuts:
Ctrl + 0
Ctrl + 1
Ctrl + 2
Ctrl + 3
and so on.
Note: It isnt necessary to mark the whole paragraph beforehand just place the cursor anywhere within the paragraph and apply one of the above short cuts.
For those of you who use Macs: its not the Ctrl Key but the Cmd Key instead. But Ill
leave it up to you to figure out the variations. Linux machines use the same keys as Windows.
left alignment
conciseness
Style
Size
Typeface
Spacing above
Spacing below
Level 1
16pt
Bold
1.2 cm
0.5 cm
Level 2
13pt
Bold
1 cm
0.4 cm
Level 3
13pt
Standard or Italic
0.8 cm
0.3 cm
Table 1: Styles for first three levels of headings based on font Garamond (just a suggestion)
Blank Lines?
When in a hurry its tempting, instead of using this method, to simply add a couple of blank
lines before a heading and another blank line following it in order to influence spacing. That
would be a mistake. For one it would destroy the sticking effect, i.e. the property of headings to always keep together with the next paragraph, and second it would lead to inconsistent
spacings above and below the title. The desired spacings must be recorded in the header styles.
A more elegant alternative would be to right click the paragraph immediately following the
heading and choose Paragraph (not Edit paragraph style) and there under the tab
Text Flow choose Do not split paragraph. The paragraph in question will pull the
heading immediately above it along to the next page should there not be enough room for
both on the present page. Using this method consistently spares you the ordeal of a final
check for any misplaced headings. Note: youve changed the formatting of this one paragraph
here, not the overall Paragraph Style!
Settings
Under Tools Options OpenOffice.org Writer Compatibility uncheck three
choice boxes:
unchecking this option ensures that inserting a new line using short cut
Shift + Return will not expand the words on the previous line right up to the right
margin; instead they will be left aligned even in a paragraph with justified alignment
Having removed these three ticks dont forget to press the button Use as Default so that
these changes apply also to any future documents.
Chapter Numbering
Arabic numbers for the first two levels and A), B), C)
for the third whereby the closing bracket is simply a Separator After.
3: Don't ativate numbering directly
When using 1, 2, 3 style it is common to Show sub- Illustration
from the menu! This method is good for numbered
levels. This means that heading 5.2.7 for instance will lists only.
appear exactly as 5.2.7 and not simply as 7. If you use the the A), B), C) style for the
third level then preferably dont show sub-levels, instead opt for a simple C) for instance
instead of the full length 5.2.C).
Illustration 6: You need to leave enough room for your chapter numbers. Standard for first level headings is 0,76cm. You will notice the same values
also appear in the paragraph style Heading 1 (First line indent preceded by a minus sign though!). Make sure this correspondence between both
menus is maintained in case you change these values. This will ensure the proper alignment of header text, each line starting neatly directly under the
preceding lign, leaving the chapter number in its own space to the very left.
Table of Contents
To update your table of contents as well as any other inserted material open menu Tools
Update Update all.
Alignment
As you can see in illustrations 7
and 10 the numbering of the
second level is aligned right under
the entry of the first level creating
a kind of staircase effect. For this
to work properly you need to
have automatic chapter numbering turned on.
Illustration 8: The 4 standard entries. Add a Tab stop between E# and E. Leave
position at 0cm.
By default the table of contents contains the following four Entries (see illustration 8):
Chapter number: E#
Entry: E
Tab stop
Page number: #
The important concept to keep in mind is that you need a negative indenting to accommodate
the chapter number (see illustration 10).
Indent before text
Spacing before
paragraph
1st level
0.80 cm
-0.80 cm
0.4 cm
2 level
1.80 cm
-1.00 cm
0.2 cm
3rd level
3.00 cm
-1.20 cm
0.2 cm
nd
Table 2: Indentation needed for first three levels when using full sub-levels like "5.7.2".
Outline
Sometimes you might be asked to hand in an outline of your work in advance of the actual
homework or thesis. You can use chapter headings for this purpose, then generate a table of
contents as described above though removing the last two entries (punctuated tab stop and
page number), leaving just chapter number and name. Then replace the title Table of Contents with Outline. Finally place your outline on a new page using Ctrl + Return, add
pertinent information at top of page (name, subject etc.) and print this one page.
Navigator
A click on the Double arrow up (see illustration 11) will move the whole chapter including
subsections, footnotes, illustrations etc. up what OpenOffice calls Promoting a chapter.
So chapter 5 for example will swap places with chapter 4. Numbering will be automatically
updated providing of course youve switched chapter numbering on (see section 6). Conversely you can Demote a chapter using the Double arrow down. Using the Double
arrow right will Demote level of a chapter, say chapter 5 down to section 4.x. Conversely use the Double Arrow Left to Promote level of chapter, e.g. section 4.x to
chapter 5.
Apart from headings, the navigator also lists graphics, tables, hyperlinks, the table of contents
and many other objects you can easily jump to with a double-click.
Unlike the table of contents, the Navigator updates itself automatically.
The Navigator is especially useful in the context of group work see section 10.
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:
make sure all participants use the Text body-style for the Text Body and under no circumstances the Default-style!
be sure to completely avoid any manual formatting, always apply styles and make sure
all members of the group apply the same styles with the same names for the same purposes and with the same formatting
Joining the various contributions in one document is then only a matter of a couple minutes:
Of course you can always make adjustments at a later stage. See also Section 14 to discover an
easy way to export styles for later use by yourself or others.
click on the 4th icon to list all Page styles (see illustration 12)
select Modify
confirm OK
place the cursor somewhere on your first text page of text and double-click on the page
format Default to activate it
on the top right hand corner of the pop-up menu click on the small black triangle
pointing downwards and chose the first option New Style from Selection
give your new style the name of one of the group members, say Leila
repeat these last two steps for each member of the group
go back to your document and place the cursor at the very end of the text authored by
the group
press the tab key once to move the cursor to the right margin
in order to jump from Leilas last page to Johns first page, place cursor at very bottom
of former and again open menu Insert Manual break and under Style select
John
10
repeat the procedure for all group members at the very end spring back again from
the last group member to Default Page style
Note: The function New Style from Selection we came across above works for all style
categories including paragraph styles. For us it worked for the active Page style for the
simple reason that we had chosen that category beforehand (the 4 th button from the left).
11 Proofreading
You will probably want someone to have a look at your thesis or any other really important
paper before handing it in. At the same time you would most likely also want to see any
changes or suggestions he or she may have made before accepting or possibly rejecting them,
and not simply rely on blind faith. I myself do that regularly with other translators I cooperate
with. For this purpose use the menu Edit Changes.
Step-by-step:
she opens the file and chooses the menu Edit Changes Record as well as
Show (from this point on any additions or deletions she makes are marked in colour
and her name as well as date and time of each change are registered)
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; clicking on any one of them brings you to the text passage
in question and you can choose to Accept or Reject it (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; this way everybody will know who made what changes
12 Text Body
Now at last we can talk about the Text Body,
the actual content, the real substance of any
lengthy document. Like all other elements,
the text body has its own specific paragraph
style, appropriately named Text body, containing a whole plethora of settings (see
illustration 14).
Any paragraph can be made into Text
body by placing the cursor in it and press- Illustration 14: Paragraph style "Text Body" for main text
ing Ctrl + 0. Right clicking such a paragraph offers you the option Edit paragraph
11
which in turn brings up a pop-up menu where you can make a number of adjustments (illustration 14).
style
By default Text body allows for a Spacing below paragraph of 0,21mm, which is
exactly 6pt which in turn is exactly half the hight of a standard 12pt font. This very
modest spacing is nevertheless enough to highlight the start of a new paragraph, thus speading up reading.*
A typical setting for your body text in a university environment might well be Line spacing
of 1.5 lines, i.e. 150%. But from an optical point of view a Proportional Line Spacing
of 120% should do.
Also you will probably want your text to be justified, meaning that it be aligned to both
left and right margins unlike headings or a poem, which you would want to be left
aligned with ragged margins.
If you choose Alignment justified, then you will also need to activate automatic hyphenation: Text flow Hyphenation Automatically. Automatic hyphenation is important
in order to avoid large gaps in case a long word doesnt fit at the end of the line and moves on
to the next line so that the remaining words sprawl right up to the right margin. However, in
order to avoid too many hyphenations you can augment the Characters at end of line
and also Characters at beginning of line from 2 to 3. This way short words such
as impact wont get split.
Under the tab Text flow you should activate Orphan control and Widow control.
The former avoids a solitary line at the bottom of a page. It will automatically move on to the
next page to join the rest of the paragraph. The latter avoids a lonely line at the very top of a
page. It will automatically pull the last line from the previous page.
Note: Never use the paragraph style Default for your body. The Default style is there to
fix general settings for all styles. Its a common mistake. See Style basics in section 13 for
detailed information.
13 Style basics
We have already acquainted ourselves with paragraph styles for headings, for the text body and
for the various levels in the table of contents. Other elements such as footnotes, quotes, liter ature lists and so on all have their own individual styles. You can create new styles to suit your
needs.
All these various styles form a kind of family tree, the root paragraph style being the one
called Default. This is the one you should never use! Its there only for overall settings, not
for a specific element of your thesis. There are families of styles, e.g. various text body
styles, so styles tend to form a loose hierarchy.
* Another alternative one often used in books is instead to indent the first line by say 3mm. But then you
would need an extra paragraph style for those paragraphs immediately following a heading, which dont need
any indentation.
12
13
Default Formatting?
Under the menu Format you will see the option Default Formatting (shortcut Ctrl +
m). If you mark text and apply Default Formatting to it, the marked text will loose any
formatting you may have applied previously and take all its formatting exclusively from the
Paragraph style it belongs to. This is very practical for removing any unwanted hidden
formats in a Microsoft Word file. Why the shortcut Ctrl + m? The m possibly stands for
delete Manual formatting? You should not confuse the term Default Formatting with
the term Default paragraph style!
14 Reusing styles
You can export your styles so as to reuse them at some later date or even pass them on to
other users (useful for group work). To do that, go to Menu File Templates Save
and choose an appropriate name such as Thesis. In order to import a style you have saved,
go to Menu Format Styles and formatting and there choose the small black triangle
pointing downwards in the menu bar. Here press Load Styles You will be presented
with a list of styles, amongst them your Thesis. Here you can choose which categories you
would like to import and if the imported styles should overwrite existing styles, which is very
useful for post-formatting group work (see section 10). Also you can import styles directly
from an existing document, in which case you neednt have previously exported them.
15 MS-Word
In case your lecturer insists you provide a Microsoft Word document instead of a PDF, just
export your document to Word by choosing File Save as and then selecting File
type Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP.
If on the other hand you have just imported a Word document full of manual formatting
without consistent use of styles you will need to clean the text. There are two ways to go
about it:
1. The more radical but very simple solution is to
i.
ii. turn the marked text into Text body with Ctrl + 0
iii. make sure all old formatting disappears completely with shortcut Ctrl + m
iv. format your text from scratch using styles
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. In the list of Page styles you should also delete all Convert and MP
styles these are namely remnants from Word.
14
Note: I strongly recommend not using Microsoft Word. We all know how popular MS Word is,
almost everybody has it though not necessarily legally. Some people will argue, Well, you
must use it, because its the standard. Or they might say: Well, you know, later on in your
future work place you will probably have to use it, so you might as well get used to it. In reality Word shows little respect for typographical standards. To take just one example: Word pos itions the page header not in relation to the text but instead inside the upper margin and relat ive to the upper edge of the page. So the wider the margins get the greater the distance
between the header and the actual text becomes. This means you have to adjust the distance
between header and upper edge of page separately in order to move it closer down to the
actual text (and vice-versa if you again change your mind) see illustration 17. OpenOffice
follows the general rule of subtracting the necessary space for the header from the space
reserved for the text leaving the upper margin untouched. Same goes of course for page foot ers. Besides, MS Word menus are extremely unstructured making it very difficult to find
things. Instead you are offered a whole palette of pretty buttons you can press, with such noncommittal names as intensive quote which are anything but standard concepts in typography
see illustration 18. Also the .doc format is not an open standard but proprietary of
Microsoft. And why waste your time now using an inadequate programme simply because later
on in life you might have to any way? Its a bit like the kindergarten argument: Get the kids
used to harsh discipline at an early because it will make it easier for them during military ser vice. I for one see it the other way round: enjoy life as much and as long as you can, and that
will give you greater stamina to resist any misery in store for you later on.
UpperMargin
Result in MS Word
Result in Openoffice
Illustration 17: As you can see the header in Word sticks to the upper page
edge regardless of margin width and away from the main text to which it
belongs; OpenOffice leaves margin free.
Illustration 18: Microsoft Word: Lots of buttons which change around dynamically depending on what you are doing (German version)
15
press the 4th icon for the list of Page Styles (illustration 19)
confirm OK
in the list right click on the page style Default and choose Modify
under the tab Header tick Header on (alternatively choose the tab Footer and
tick Footer on) to accommodate your page numbers
having thus prepared these two page styles now place the cursor in your very first page
of your document, i.e. the title page, and double-click the style First page in your
list of Page Styles in order to actually apply it to your first page and the following
pages (this demonstrates styles that need to be applied with a double-click changing a
style doesnt mean youre necessarily actually going to use it)
place your cursor at the very bottom of your title page and insert a new page to later
fit 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)
* This latter requirement by the way does not necessarily correspond to custom book editing. Normally all
pages count, even empty non-numbered ones.
16
confirm OK
So now you have two First Pages followed by Default Pages beginning with number
1 as in illustration 21.
Illustration 21: Between the first and second page we have a simple page break (Ctrl + Return); between second and third page we have a manual
page break with numbering restarting at 1; thereafter we have automatic page breaks
Its basically the same method we already came across in section 10 on group work in which
we described how to use individual page styles for each author in a work group. Similarly you
could create a Roman page style with Roman numbering instead of Arabic for a preface
(see section 20).
later on youll loose track of which files belong to each other on your hard disk
youll find it difficult to create a single final PDF-document for publication or mailing
purposes
you loose the capacity to automatically create your table of contents and other indices
17 Title Page
The title page is the only page where you wont need styles and indeed should mark your text
and format it manually.
I would suggest the following settings:
17
for the main title, 20pt standard for the subtitle, both centred and
approximately one third down from upper margin
24pt bold
Line spacing
of 1 and Spacing Above paragraph as well as Below paragraph of 0; this will give the various main elements of your title page (top part,
middle part and bottom part) a more compact appearance
title / topic
lecturers name
author(s)
student ID
date / deadline
an empty line followed by a separator line (shortcut: two or three Dashes + Return)
followed by another empty line
I would recommend using Bold font, size 14pt for the information section.
The actual text should begin immediately below the separator line and all pages including this
first one should be numbered preferably in the page footer rather than the header so as to
avoid visual conflict with the information section. If you really want page numbering on top
of the page, then you will need two page styles, one First Page with no header and the rest
Default with header for numbering. The second page will automatically be numbered 2.
18
Note: Do not confuse this information section with a header. A header gets repeated on each page,
your information section appears only once on the very first page.
19 Default Page
As already mentioned in section 16 the Default page needs to be modified giving it a larger
left margin of 3cm for the punch holes and most importantly a Header for the page numbers.* Here once again the individual steps:
activate the fourth button to list the Page styles (see illustration 19)
right
choose Modify
under the tab Page increase the Margin Left from 2cm to 3cm
confirm OK
double click
You would leave this information left aligned, remove the middle Illustration 23: The 4 alignment buttons: left, centre, right and justified
tab stop (the in the ruler bar) by
pulling it down with your mouse and then press the Tab key to shift the page number to the
right margin. Every time a new chapter starts, the header will change along with it.
click the fourth button to list Page styles (see illustration 19)
* Instead of a Header you might prefer a Footer. Footers used to be very popular, but many students now
prefer headers to accommodate not only the page number but also extra information such as his or her name
and matriculation number.
19
under the tab Organiser type Roman and as Next style also Roman so as to
allow for several consecutive pages with Roman numbering
confirm OK
later on place cursor the the very end of your last Roman style page
again open menu Insert Manual break Page break and under Style
choose this time Default; in this same menu again Change page number to 1
again confirm OK
So what have we achieved by this? Your document now contains three page styles:
In between the styles you inserted a manual page break and restarted numbering.
This is basically the same method we already came across in section 10 on group work when
you wanted unique headers for each member of the work group and each member therefore
needed his or her own individual page style.
Note: OpenOffice insists on turning any page with an uneven page number into a right page
just like in any magazine. So if you insert, say, a manual page break at the end of page 3 and
tell the programme to restart page numbering with a 1, it will insert a blank page to carry
the page number 4. This behaviour is correct. You cannot delete this blank page but you can
choose not to print it by unchecking Print automatically inserted blank pages under
the tab OpenOffice.org Writer in the print pop-up menu.
20
Note: In case numbering is broken, i.e. restarts again with a 1. in the middle, you have to
place the cursor at the beginning of the first wrongly numbered entry and delete the number
backwards pressing the Backspace key twice and then repress Return in order to take on
again from there. You might have to repeat this operation a couple of times. A bit fiddly, but
it works.
21
22 Line Numbering
Line Numbering comes in handy for interviews, enabling references of the kind: See interview
line 22. However you probably wont want all the lines of your thesis numbered, only the
lines of the actual interview. Also, in case you had several interviews, they should each start
with the number 1.
Here is how to go about it:
go to menu Tools Line Numbering and tick the box Show numbering; change
the Interval from 5 to 1 lines to facilitate location; untick the box Blank
lines; from now on the programme has global permission to number all lines
Modify
in the list of paragraph styles ( F11) right the paragraph style Text Body and choose
option New
under the tab Outline & Numbering activate Include this paragraph in
line numbering; from now on only lines in Interview style paragraphs will be
numbered
place the cursor in the first paragraph of the interview and double-click on the menu
entry Interview to apply this style; should your interview consist of several paragraphs you can mark these beforehand and apply the style Interview to all of them
in one go
the paragraph style Default: under the tab Outline & Numbering untick
Include this paragraph in line numbering; this ensures that for all styles
based on the Default style line numbering is turned off
In order to restart numbering at the first paragraph of the second interview right click it and
choose Paragraph (not Edit Paragraph Style) and under the tab Outline & Numbering tick Restart at this paragraph.
23 Cross-References
Long documents often contain references of the sort see chapter xx on page yy or see
illustration nn on page mm. These place holders get automatically substituted by the actual
numbers. You wouldnt want to write literally see chapter 12 on page 36, because these
numbers might soon become obsolete as you move chapters around or include further illustrations etc.
To reference a chapter go to Insert Cross-reference Cross-references and
choose Headings in the top left hand column. In the right hand column pick out the chapter
heading you would like to refer to. In the bottom left hand column select whether to refer to
the number of the page the heading is situated on or the number of the heading itself
(providing you have numbered headings) or even both, then confirm Insert and Close. In
similar fashion you can point to tables or illustrations (providing they have numbered captions).
22
24 Footnotes
To add a footnote go to menu Insert Footnote/Endnote and confirm OK. The programme will do the numbering for you. You can even cut a footnote anchor and move it
around your text, placing it before or after other footnotes, and footnote numbering will be
immediately updated.
On the whole its best to do without footnotes. You might, however, want to use them to
point to further reading or arguments by other authors which you dont want to deal with dir ectly in your main text because that would interrupt the flow of reading. In this case you
might want to use endnotes instead of footnotes.
For bibliographical purposes you dont really need footnotes. Use the Harvard notation
instead: (Wilson 2005 : 27), (Wilson 2005a : 27) in case you are referring to several of his writ ings of the year 2005 and (Wilson et al. 2005 : 27) in case you are referring to a work co-au thored by Wilson. In other words limit yourself to authors name, date of publication and
page number directly inside your text. Reserve all other details for your bibliography at the end
of your paper (see section 25).
The Harvard Notation without recourse to footnotes is by the way not necessarily the most
suitable in all circumstances. In university circles, where arguments often follow the flow of
quoted authors, it does seem appropriate. But in other contexts these brackets right in the
middle of your text could be quite distracting. In this case footnotes are justified. Either way,
only insert the minimum amount of information necessary.
Footnotes like all other elements have their own individual paragraph style based on
Default.
You can jump from one footnote to the next using the Up and Down arrow keys without
having to return to your text in between. This facilitates an overall brush-up of all your footnotes in one go.
In case you only have a few footnotes, its better to use a single Character, an * for
instance, instead of Automatic Numbering*.
25 Bibliography
A literature list might look something like this:
Fredrickson, George M., Racism: A Short History, Princeton, 2002
Keevak, Michael, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking, Princeton, 2011
Thielen, Marc, Jenseits von Tradition Modernitt und Vernderung mnnlicher Lebensweisen in der Migration als Provokation fr die (Sexual-)Pdagogik, in: Zeitschrift fr Pdagogik 6/2010, Beltz-Verlag
* Umberto Ecos How to Write a Thesis is a wonderfully enjoyable guide for anyone wishing to embark on
such a journey. Unfortunately this work by the great philosopher and writer doesnt seem to have been
translated into English.
23
choose New
under tab Indents & Spacing set the Indent Before text to 0.8cm and the
Indent First line to -0.8cm (i.e. a negative number).
To sort this list alphabetically mark all the entries, open menu Tools Sort and confirm
OK.
Note: This feature of negative indent is used for other kinds of lists such as dictionaries and
indices (often in combination with a Bold font for the key word).
26 Quotes
Short quotes (from a few words up to two or three lines) need double quotation marks to
set them off from the rest of the text, quotes within quotes simple quotation marks. A quote
exceeding three or four lines needs to be put in a paragraph of its own using the paragraph
style Quotations which provides for an Indent before text of 1cm and an Indent
after text also of 1cm. You could further adapt the Quotations style, choosing Proportional Line spacing of 130% instead of 1.5 and giving it a slightly smaller sized
font of 11pt instead of 12pt. Italics are not commonly used any more for quotes.
Ellipses in square brackets [] are used as a stand-in for left-out parts of your quote. The
amount of left-out text should not, however, be too large, otherwise the whole thing could
become quite arbitrary and you could end up using bits of the original text but completely
devoid of the original context. Square brackets can also be used to signify change of capital isation. Sometimes they are used to insert translations of unfamiliar words. Example: The
totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation []. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of
social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their
existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. (Karl Marx, Preface
to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859)
24
An ellipsis without square brackets is often used as a stylistic means for symbolizing incomplete
utterances. I dont know , he said, wanting to gain time.
When to Quote?
Use quotes sparingly. If you are say simply describing the views of an author on child education, then preferably do it in your own words. Too many direct quotes could easily give the
reader the impression you are just beefing up your text.
There are two circumstances where you would in my opinion need direct quotes: You want to
analyse a possibly controversial or particularly difficult passage in depth, in which case you of
course need to quote the object of your analysis not forgetting of course to take into con sideration the textual as well as the historical and social context in which it is embedded and
which readership it addresses. Another situation would be if you want to prove that the author
is contradicting him or herself or that his or her public face does not correspond to what she
writes in this or that other publication.
27 Tables
You insert a Table under the menu Table
Insert Table. You will be asked to
determine the number of Columns and
the number of Rows. You can always add
or remove columns and rows using the
green and red buttons as shown in illustra- Illustration 27: As long as your cursor remains inside the table, this little
tion 27. You can vary the width of the pop-up menu will keep you company. Clicking on the green bar inserts a
new line
columns using the mouse pointer. To
delete a table place your cursor inside it and choose menu Table Delete Table.
In case your table contains too many lines to fit on the page you can give the programme permission to split it and move the bottom part onto the following page. On the other hand if its
only a very small table containing just a few lines you probably would prefer not to split it but
instead keep it in one piece. To set this behaviour right click anywhere in your table and
choose Table. In the floating menu Text flow tick or untick Allow table to split
across pages and columns. Here you can also decide to Repeat Heading on each page
in which case you also need to define the number of lines your heading consists of.
If your table contains too many columns to fit comfortably between the left and right margins
you can either choose a Landscape page style instead of Portrait or place your table at
the end of your thesis in the appendix using a larger paper size A3 (again Landscape
format if need be). (See section 16 on instructions for switching from one page style to
another.)
In order to insert a caption at the bottom of the table, simply right click your table and choose
Caption. This Caption will be automatically numbered, making it easy to reference it and
write see table XY (see section 23 on cross-references). Apart from your table of contents
you can also opt for an index of your tables.
25
Branch
Great importance
Lesser Importance
No Deployment
All branches
83,8
15,2
91,6
7,5
0,9
91
Telecommunications
89,6
9,1
1,3
83,3
16,7
75
25
Administration
70,8
26,1
3,1
69,7
27,3
67
31,9
1,1
Industry
Table 3. Source: http://www.heise.de/open/artikel/Open-Source-ist-in-den-Unternehmen-angekommen224504.html (Extract of survey carried out by the magazine Heise on the deployment of open source
software based on 1312 valid records from 3500 companies asked to participate in the year 2009 answers
in percent)
You can also create tables without visible borders, for instance for your curriculum vitae (date
in the left column, rest of text in the right column) or with column borders but no separating
lines for excerpting .
If you want several adjacent columns to all be of the same width, mark them with the mouse
and choose menu Table Autofit Distribute columns evenly.
28 Charts
You can display the information contained in Table 3 in the shape of a chart as in illustration
28. Here is how to go about it:
1. Mark the whole table (rows and columns) using left mouse button.
2. Choose menu Insert Object Chart.
3. In the pop-up window choose the kind of chart you want (e.g. bar instead of
columns) and add a title.
4. Confirm your choices pressing Finish
5. 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 the various areas of your chart offer you
further options.
Note: Be careful not to clutter up your page with too many graphs and illustrations. Should one
graph overlap with another, add one empty paragraph below the first graph and make your
second graph Anchor to this new empty paragraph. Every graph or frame needs a separate
anchor point usually a paragraph, though you could also anchor it to the page or treat it as a
single character. This shows that OpenOffice Writer is primarily a text programme and not a
layout programme for fancy layouts use the open source programme Scribus.
26
20
40
60
80
100
29 Pictures
You can insert pictures or photos from your hard drive or stick: go to Insert Picture
From File and choose the picture you want.
You can also insert a picture directly from the internet by right clicking it and choosing Copy.
Back in your text insert it using shortcut Ctrl + v.
Again, dont forget to give all your pictures a caption, so you can easily reference them (see
section 23 on Cross-References) and automatically create a table of illustrations.
27
30 Snapshots
Occasionally it is technically not possible to simply right click on an image you would like to
insert from a website. It might for example be part of a protected PDF document which you
cannot even download. In this case you need to take a screenshot and remove areas you don t
need. I highly recommend the fast and easy to use freeware programme Xnview (or Ksnapshot under Linux) for this task. Here is how you go about it using Xnview (basically same pro cedure for Ksnapshot):
1. Position the internet page on your screen so you see the relevant part you need; mag nify to the maximum fit.
2. Launch Xnview.
3. Press the icon Capture (the camera) to take a screenshot.
4. Choose the window you want to capture.
5. As soon as your screenshot appears, select area you actually want and press Shift + x
so as to remove unwanted surrounding area (menu Edit Crop).
6. Press Ctrl + a to mark remaining contents and Ctrl + c to copy these into
memory.
7. Back in your thesis press Ctrl + v to insert image into your text.
8. Using right mouse button on your image add a Caption as in Illustration 29.
Sex
Level of rejection in %
20
80
70
30
90
80
80
100
10
60
11
40
12
90
Table 4: Degree of aversion amongst men and women towards violent videos
Sex
Level of rejection in %
81
34
Total
62
Table 5: Same data as above in form of cross table showing that women
reject violent videos to a greater degree than men (or pretend to do so)
To obtain the summary as displayed in table 5 do the following:
29
1. Mark the two columns of interest, i.e. sex and extent of rejection including the
title line in the raw data table 4, copy them into memory, go to the module Spreadsheet (menu File New Spreadsheet) and there reinsert them using shortcut
Illustration 30: After having dragged the two buttons Sex and Level of into their appropriate fields, go to Options and choose
Average
Ctrl
v.
2. In your spreadsheet again mark the two columns and go to menu Data
DataPilot Start Current selection.
3. Drag and drop the button Sex onto the white area Row Fields and Level of
rejection onto the white area Data Fields; press Options and choose Average; confirm OK and again OK (see illustration 30).
4. Your new cross table now appears on your spreadsheet.
5. Mark it and go to menu Format Cells Numbers -1234 with Decimal
place value 0 and Leading zero value 1; confirm with OK (see illustration 31).
This way you will avoid decimal places.
6. Copy your newly formatted cross table into computer memory (Ctrl + c).
7. Back to your text file insert the contents (as opposed to a direct image) of the cross table
using menu Edit Paste Special Formatted text [RTF] (or keyboard
shortcut Shift + Ctrl + v and not simply Ctrl + v)
8. You can now freely format your newly inserted table.
9. Finally right click it and add a Legend.
30
31
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
Left handedness
14%
60%
33%
Right handedness
86%
40%
67%
Illustration 32: 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 button More choose % of row
32
In other words you want to achieve two things: i) the url should start on the same line as the
preceding phrase and ii) you want to be able to insert a line break at the right place.
For this you need to do the following:
1. Under Tools Options Language Settings Languages tick the box next
to Show UI Elements for Bi-directional writing.
2. Place the cursor after any / or _ where you might want a line break.
3. Activate the menu Insert Formatting Mark No-width optional break.
4. If you have lots of URLs you can speed up the process by Finding & Replacing
(in the menu Edit) all occurrences of / with your new combination of /No-width
optional break; conversely, in order to prevent http:// from breaking at the end
of a line, you can replace all double occurrences of /No-width optional break
with //; you could apply the same logic to the underscore _ and other such typical
URL characters.
34 Fonts
For your Text body you should use a font with serifs. Serifs are the horizontal stroke at the
tips of the letters, mostly coinciding with the base line as in the letters i or m, a few lying
above as in w and another set placed below the line as for letters p and q. A few charac ters such as o have no serifs. A typical example of a serif font is Times New Roman. These
serifs have the effect of giving the letter some optical stability on the horizontal axis and also
reducing the gaps between letters, thus making them to a degree fuse together so words
become more compact instead of being a collection of individual letters as in the non-serif
font Arial. The overall effect is to increase reading speed as you tend to seize complete words
as units, your eyes jumping from one word to the next rather than from one letter to the next.
For main titles, posters, flyers etc., whose object it is precisely to attract more attention, fonts
without serifs are very suitable.
35 Emphasis
Avoid bold type in order to emphasise a word, instead use italics. In the old days of mechanical typewriters you couldnt do that. So instead people would hammer over the text two or
three times to achieve boldness, or they would underline their text, or possibly choose to
s p a c e o u t the passage or use CAPITAL LETTERS. 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 authors name is
the use of SMALL CAPITALS. See section 25 on how to format your Bibliography.
36 Special Characters
You will find these under Insert Special Character. If you need a particular character or even a complete string of characters very often, say [], and dont want to keep on
typing out the sequence, you can mark it once, go to Tools AutoCorrect Options and
type in on the left hand side under Replace a shortcut such as xxx. Then press New and
confirm with OK. Now every time you write xxx followed by a space the programme will
automatically write [] for you.
The list of replacements you just used to do this contains lots of standard replacements, e.g.
34
two short dashes will be replaced by one long one and three dots by an ellipsis.
38 Shortcut keys
OpenOffice Writer has a bunch of shortcuts to make life easier. Here some of the most useful:
Ctrl + 0
Ctrl + 1
Ctrl + 2
Ctrl + 3
Ctrl + 4
Ctrl + i
Ctrl + b
Ctrl + m
Ctrl + s
save file
Ctrl + p
print file
Ctrl + f
Ctrl + c
Ctrl + x
marked text will loose all manual formatting only those defined in the paragraph style will survive
cut out and move marked text to computer memory (x symbolizes the
scissors)
insert contents of computer memory (v symbolizes the insertion)
Ctrl + v
Ctrl + shift + v
Ctrl + Return
Return
Shift + Return
Ctrl + -
same as above, only you can choose to insert text with reduced
formatting or no formatting at all
start a new page (page break)
Ctrl + Shift + -
+ - + Space
. + . + . + space
Alt + shift + F8 to change selection mode from standard to vertical ( Block area)
long hyphen
ellipse
39 Mouse Clicks
40 PDFs
PDF (Portable Data Format) was developed by Adobe. The PDF format is operating system,
monitor and printer independent, making it increasingly popular for document distribution.
To export your file to PDF just press the PDF symbol in the menu bar. Or choose the menu
File Export as PDF This latter method offers you more options.
Use freeware PDF24 to manage PDF documents, for instance to delete individual pages or
merge PDF files together. Members of the Linux-Ubuntu community can download the programme Master PDF editor gratis to freely manipulate PDF files.
save your work regularly, about every five minutes, using ascending numbering and
easy to remember mnemonics:
self_explanatory_descriptive_title_01
self_explanatory_descriptive_title_02
self_explanatory_descriptive_title_03
mail your work to yourself regularly, so you have access to it from anywhere you might
be; dont rely on memory sticks
* Linux for example, unlike Windows, treats Thesis.doc, THESIS.DOC and thesis.doc as three separate
files and also sorts all uppercase letters before lowercase ones.
36
44 Spell Check
In the menu bar you can activate AutoSpellCheck by pressing the ABC-Button (F7). Any
unknown words will appear underlined in red. To add an unknown word to the standard dictionary right-click it and choose Add standard.dic. So over time the programme will
increase its vocabulary providing you are always using the same computer of course.
You can edit the standard.dic manually under Tools Options Language settings Writing aids. In the window User-defined dictionaries choose Edit.
Type in a new word and confirm by pressing New.
The language in use is defined in the paragraph style under the tab Font. So a text containing
several languages can be spell checked providing you have the appropriate dictionaries
installed. You can download extra language packs from openoffice.org.
45 Synonyms
Under Tools Language Thesaurus (Ctrl + F7) the programme lists quite a few
alternatives to the word the cursor happens to be in. A good online dictionary covering several
languages is thefreedictionary.com.
37
46 Document Infos
Sometimes you might want to store general information about your file. To do this, go to
File Properties Description. In the same menu under the tab Statistics you
will get a summary of number of paragraphs, words, characters and so on your text contains.
A more succinct summary can be accessed directly under the menu Tools Word Count.
If you want the same information for just one particular section, mark it beforehand.
The name of the current editor 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.
and illustration 33 (these apply to A4-paper with 3 x 8 labels). Press button New document. At this point a new A4 page will appear with 24 labels, each one with the three
field names as in illustration 34. You can now print your document on sheets with selfadhesive labels. During the printing process the place holders will get substituted by
the actual names, streets and cities listed in your spreadsheet. (The programme also
offers you the alternative to print to an .odt file instead of a physical printer.)
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
Rows
To create a bulk letter you basically follow the same steps. You start with a simple text file.
When you get to the part My dear friend , open Insert Fields Other Database Mail merge fields. You will be presented with a list of databases. Select the one
you need, i.e. addresses sheet1. Pressing the next to sheet1 will open up a list of
all your fields (Name, Street, City etc.). Click on Name and now all the names will be
inserted automatically one after the other, one per each copy of your letter, after the My dear
friend . The rest of the letter is just text.
39
Illustration 34: The new file in format A4 contains place holders which will be replaced by actual
addresses while printing (whether to printer or to file)
48 Help
Under the menu Help you will find easy to follow step-by-step instructions. Also, while hovering with your mouse pointer over any button or menu, you will be offered shorter or longer
tips depending on your settings in Tools Options OpenOffice.org General
(see illustration 35). Using Google you will usually find very useful and concise help too:
simply type in a couple keywords and the term OpenOffice and thats it.
Illustration 35: Under menu Tools/Options/General you can determine the depth of information
you desire
40
50 Basic Practice
1. Download unformatted file prax-en.txt
go to openoffice-uni.org
confirm Save
confirm Save
leaving text still marked open menu Format Default Formatting (shortcut
Ctrl + m)
any paragraph
check that top bar of pop-up menu does indeed display Paragraph Style: Text
Body
under tab Indents & Spacing increase Line spacing to 1.5 lines
41
in the pop-up list of paragraph styles right-click the style Heading 1 and
choose Modify
(or Times)
Typeface Bold
repeat these steps for paragraph style Heading 2 (second level) with following values:
Spacing Above paragraph
to 0,8cm
to 0,4cm
Font Garamond
(or Times)
Size 13pt
Typeface Bold
confirm OK
42
in chapter 5 look out for subheadings (the ones beginning with ?), delete the question mark and spaces and apply style Heading 2 using shortcut Ctrl + 2
mark the contents of your title page including date of publication (try to use shift
+ arrow keys instead of mouse pointer to do this)
open menu Format Paragraph (not the menu Format Styles and
Formatting)
confirm OK
with contents of title page still marked centre justify it with button Centred in
menu bar
increase font size from 12pt to 14pt (again using menu bar)
mark just the word Writer, increase font size from 20pt to 36pt and apply
typeface Bold
place cursor pointer directly to the right of publication date and press Ctrl +
return to force a page break
note the blue line at the top of the new page symbolizing a page break
confirm OK
43
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 (so that both your levels have same entries)
confirm OK
(positive value)
(negative value)
confirm OK
repeat these steps for second level entries with following values:
Indent Before text 1,8cm
Indent First line -1cm
(positive value)
(negative value)
Confirm OK
insert value 1
confirm OK
44
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)
confirm OK
again choose fourth button from left in menu bar for Page Styles
confirm OK
again choose fourth button from left in menu bar for Page Styles
right align your newly inserted page number using appropriate button in menu bar
51 Extra Practice
format a few passages as interviews with numbered lines (see section 22)
create a simple table and insert a chart based on this table (see chapter 28)
45