Hello, this is Huka, welcome to Hacker Public Radio, and to the next in our ongoing series
on Libra office writer.
What we have done in the last few episodes is we introduce the idea of paragraph-level
styles, we showed how to create or in some cases modify the styles so that they work the
way you want them to, but I think at this point it probably makes a little bit of sense
to start tying up what's going on here because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to
create all these styles if you don't understand in terms of your workflow how you're going
to actually use them when you are creating documents and so I want to spend a little bit
of time on that today, okay?
Now depending on the situation, let's say you're going to create some new text, you know,
you're starting a brand new document or whatever, you know, in a case like that, you know,
it's not terribly hard, okay?
You can, I did recently at Ohio Linux Fest, I opened a class there, all right?
I was given a chance to do, it's about a two-hour class for newcomers and the idea was
that I would do a brief look at all of Libra office, that's a lot to do in two hours, okay?
So you want to get people's attention, so what I did is, you know, I'm my laptop, I just opened
up a new document and then just took my hands, you know, made a big deal out of just taking
my hands off the keyboard, the minute it opened and turned everyone and said, what do you
see?
Now, it took a few moments for them to start getting into it, but soon they started pointing
out, oh, the document started with a heading one, yep, that's right, then they noticed,
hey, the cursor, you know, technically the insertion mark, because there is a difference,
was in the middle of the line, yeah, of course I had set my default template to always
start with a heading one, and my style properties for heading one said that it would be centered,
then they noticed that the font was liberation sands, that it was bold, that the size was,
oh, something like 17 point something, points, whatever the equivalent of the 145% that
I had set in my properties, so that's a lot of settings already in place, just for opening
the document, so then I typed a title for my document, probably something really brilliant,
like this is a test document, and then very dramatically and ostentatiously used one finger
to press the enter key, and this immediately jumped down two lines because my heading one
style included a blank line after the heading one object in my properties, remember we
talked about that, we talked about headings, it also jumped to the left of the page and changed
the style to heading two with a font of liberation sands, size 16, bold, and italic,
what this happened because in my properties for heading one I had set it that the next
style would always be heading two, and all of the rest of the settings were part of the properties
for heading two, again I got what done just for one press of the key, so I then typed a subsection
setting, you know, again something really brilliant, like this is my first major section,
and then again very dramatically used one finger to press the enter key, this time it jumped two
lines just as before because my style properties for heading two also included a blank line after,
it was intended a half inch, and then you could see that the style had just changed to paragraph
because my properties for heading two specified that the next style should be paragraph,
the font had just changed to liberation sands, 12 point, and there was no bolder italic,
of course this was all from my paragraph style properties, I typed a few sentences,
and then did the one finger press of the enter key one more time and it jumped down two lines,
yes I had a blank line after the paragraph style as well, it was already intended again
and ready for my next paragraph, this was because my paragraph style properties said the next
style should be paragraph, now the point of this is that a one time investment in setting this up
can yield time savings forever, now what we were looking at there is a situation where we had
a lot of pre-programmed stuff going in, it said with this style follow with this other style
next and so on, as I say all based on probabilities, what happens if that's not where you want to
go next, okay there's there's going to be situations where you need to kind of change things
on the fly, all right, so how do we do that? Well that's not hard either, if you take a look at
your Libra office writer screen there is a drop down box right above that that docked styles
and formatting window on the left, darn well better have that docked on the left or I'm going to
get you, so right above that is a drop down box and it may be saying something like paragraph or
whatever, if you have a completely unmodified Libra office it might say something like text body or
something, so that is called the apply style drop down, so to use that you place your blinking
insertion mark anywhere within the object you want to apply the style to, this is commonly done
by just clicking on it, now I distinguish between a cursor and an insertion mark, they really are
two different things and people use them interchangeably and that's just sloppy thinking, so what's
the difference? My cursor is the thing the mouse moves around, which for me kind of looks like an arrow
head and as I move the mouse it's moving all over the screen and I can click and all of that kind of
stuff insertion mark is generally speaking a vertical line that is blanking or flashing
in your document and what it's saying is whatever you type on the keyboard is going to show up right here
okay, two different things entirely, so let's start using proper terminology, so the insertion mark
is that blinking thing in the document, so you can put your insertion mark in a particular word or
paragraph or whatever by simply clicking on it, so all you have to do is put your insertion mark
in a paragraph and go to that drop down and select a different style okay that's going to be
giving you paragraph level styles up there anyway, so selected you know keep make it a change of
paragraph to a heading or what have you. Now that's good enough, so for instance let's say I'm typing
along of just done three paragraphs and I need to put in another header, well what happens? I press the
enter key, my definition of the paragraph style says always follow a paragraph with another paragraph,
so it will very obediently drops down two lines, the index and a half inch paragraph is ready to go
and so I okay but now I want let's say heading three to go there, so I go to that drop down
and I look for heading three and select that and all of a sudden my insertion mark instead
of being indented a half inch is going to jump over to the left margin or jump over to wherever
I've set it up for my heading three, all right mine is at the left margin you know yours is
wherever you put it and all of a sudden I will have all of the heading three definitions whatever
font etc it will instantly change over. You can do it with an existing let's say you had typed
something and it's oh wait a minute for some reason my entire paragraph came out as a heading three
which looks really weird just put your insertion mark in there anywhere in the paragraph and then
changed the style from heading three to paragraph and it'll change it. Now that that drop down is
pretty useful it has a few default styles in it has styles generally that you have already used in
this document but suppose there's a style that you have not used yet in this document it's not in
the drop down but it is in your styles and formatting window as an available style well that's
pretty easy too. So put your insertion mark either you know if it's on a blank line beginning
a paragraph level object or put your insertion mark within whatever object you want and double click
on that style in the styles and formatting window and this will both apply the style to that object
and add it to the drop down because now it sees oh yes this is one that you're using how can this help
you I'm going to give an example from my own experience some years ago I was working for a college
I think I've mentioned that before probably one of these things and I was given the task of
assembling the catalog for the entire college and annual event right I say assembling because writing
the content was left to each department but we have a lot of departments some of them are
administrative registrar financial aids, student activities blah blah blah some of them are academic
history, physics, sociology, music okay so in the final analysis I got documents sent to
me from maybe 40 or 50 different departments and no two of them were done the same way
there was a mess now I can't publish a catalog by just sticking all these things together in one big
document and sending it out it would be horrible so what I had to do was create some uniformity
so the first thing I did was take each document submitted to me and fortunately it was all
electronic submissions otherwise I probably would have just quit my job and moved to Argentina or
something but there was all electronic so what I had to do was at first I had to go through and start
assigning styles functionally okay I didn't care how each style would look at this point I just
needed to understand this is a heading to this is a heading 3 this is a paired and so on and just go
through all of this stuff and just assign styles to each object so a paragraph is a paragraph a list
is a list a heading is a heading none of this had been done on anything because none of the people
doing it knew what they were doing except possibly political science because I had a friend in the
political science department who actually was a real expert on word processing so he probably did it
right but pretty much no one else did headings and lists were the biggest headache none of the
headings were labeled and I need to put them in a logical order which one was a heading one which
was heading two which was a heading three and what tends to happen in cases like this people
because they think visually rather than think logically is you know they would do things like
change the font you know I'll make this bigger I'll make it ball I'll make it a talent you know
all the stuff that we talked about we talked about heading styles you know that was in there
but you really had to kind of think and and so each submission I got there was a heading two
at the very top of that particular document and I see normally I would have said heading one but
heading one was going to be the title of the whole document or I could have made heading one
the each section it's it's not a religious thing now at the list it got really weird no one
used styles some of the lists had been done using repeated presses of the tab key trying to get
things to line up instead of using tab styles with leaders which we had talked about in the last
episode and you know when you know how to do it that's really wonderful but none of them knew
how to do it again except possibly my friend in the political science department I don't remember
what he submitted at this point so I had to go through each document and assign the appropriate
style to each element to the document so fortunately that's not hard I just started applying the
styles the way I described above and you know just go to the drop down and say this is a paragraph
this is a paragraph this is a heading three this is a list and and so on and again I didn't worry
about how it appeared at this point I just wanted to get the right functional description there
because I could always change the appearance easily I could have a 300 page document and say
I want to change all of my lists and all I have to do is change the style for lists
and the whole document updates it's wonderful if you do it right the first time
so that was that was by example of going through and and putting functional tags and all of these things
now how do we change the style properties because I said this would be real easy okay that's that's
again that's not too hard so by college catalog 200 pages roughly multiple headings multiple
levels of headings multiple lists some numbered some bulletin quite a few tab leader lists
not easy keeping this in order but styles made it a lot easier so what happens if some
vice president looks at a draft and decides she doesn't like the fact that all heading three
styles had a talent fonts and asked me to change all of them well I could go through all 200 pages
of the document looking for each heading three and manually changing each one of them and I would
probably shoot myself how my numbingly stupid is that but that no by using the styles properly
not probably all I have to do is just change the definition of the style now let's think about this
for a second what template are we working with remember templates are the containers that hold all of these
things now I've talked about the default template the default template is how I set up all of my documents
by default the default template says when I open Libra office writer and I get that blank page in
front of me what properties is that blank page gonna have and that's the default template and it's
gonna have all of my styles and all of this stuff well in this particular case I think about it
if I'm in my default template and I need to create a style that I need that has the property so
I can do a find and replace to swap out the styles so in this case I could say I'll create a new
heading three style call it heading three one point one I could begin by clicking on heading three
once to select it should now be highlighted I then go to the top right of my styles and formatting
window which is docked on the left right and that is the new style from selection drop down
all right found that so it's at the it's in the styles and formatting window
so the button on the right says new style from selection it's a drop down and it has a paragraph
mark on it so that makes it easy for you to pick it out click it select new style from selection
this will create a copy of the existing style which you can edit so change the name to heading
three one point one and change the font from a talc to one without a talc then do a fine in replace
you go to the edit menu select find and replace in the window that comes up make sure you click
more options now this is true in every word processing program I've ever dealt with in many other
programs find in replace gives you a very basic window and then there's usually something that says
if you want to do something more complicated click here and then the window expands and gives you all
sorts of more options so click the more options and that find in replace window and at the bottom
there's a check there's a box towards the bottom this says search for styles so make sure you check
that box and then the search for and replace with drop downs will be populated with styles
the search for will have all the styles that are in use in your document and the replace with
will have all the styles that are available to you now I said I would do it this way if I was in
a document based on my default template the reason is I don't want to change my default style
definition if I make this change and save the document when I go to my next new document the new
style I created will not be there because I never made it part of the template it will still be
in the document itself but it won't be in my template remember if you want to have a style
permanently available to you you need to save it in a template now in the case of the college
catalog what I would probably recommend I think the best way to do it is create a specific template
just for that purpose and then I don't have to worry about my default template getting
mudied up with what other people want to see in the catalog it can stay there and I've got
to now I've got a template for the catalog do exactly what people want and then I can just modify
the style and that's even faster though all you have to do is just right click on the style
in the styles and formatting window select modify and just go in and change it from a talent one
without a talent like you're done or as some people like to say Bob's your uncle so you know
this is an example of how you work with all of this stuff in a day-to-day workflow and I hope
that's going to be useful and helpful to you and so this is a hookah signing off and reminding you as
always please support free software thank you you have been listening to Hacker Public Radio
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