Argh…was schreib ich denn?

Ever got fed up with changeing every headline in your document by hand? Ever got fed up with update your table of content by hand? Yes? So here is a (very) short howto use OpenOffice.org Writer for doing this for you.
I decided to write this only for OpenOffice for two reasons. First OpenOffice ist OpenSource and works with more than one Operating System (for me I can’t use MS Office because I’m using Linux). Second the idea behind Styles and Formats are the same for the most Office-Software.
The first thing you have to do is to install OpenOffice on your system. Download it here.

Styles and Formats

Now lets start. At the beginning there is an empty text document. If you don’t have already one create it with [ctrl+n] or with the file-menu file->new. Everytime you have to open an entry in a menu I will write it like this menu->entry.

Check if you have the “Styles and Formats”-Toolbox open. If not, go to Format->Styles and Formats or press [F11]. Click into Headline 1 (don’t select it).

Write those lines in your document:
Styles and Formats
a short how to use them with Open Office 2.1
Headline 1
Headline 2
Headline 4
normal text

Now double-click on Headline 1 in your “Styles and Formats”-Toolbox. Do this for the other headlines as for headline 1 but select the matching type.
To format the first two lines select “Chaptertemplates” from the pull down menu you can see on the upper picture. There you set the first line to “Title” and the second line to “subtitle”.
Now you should have something like this:

Maybe you ask why to do this in that way. What would happen if you have to change the format of your headlines? If you use Styles and Formats you only have to change the template and every text with the according type will use the new parameters. In the upper picture you can see a dialog for changing the style and format for the Heading 1 template. You can open this dialog by right-clicking on “Headline 1″ in  you “Styles and Formats”-Toolbox and selct “change”. Now you can change the font-type, size, familily, style, the alignment and much more.
This should make the work with large documents much easier.

And here is another reason to use “Styles and Formats”. If you have to make a Table of content now the programme do the work for you!

Creating a TOC

Use the document from above and try to create a TOC. First open Insert->Indexes and Tables. Now a dialog like this should appear:

The left part of the dialog shows you am preview of the TOC. The right part allows you to change the appear of the appearance of you TOC. For the fist time just use the standard options – later you can play with them arround to get used to the dialog. Click on OK. OpenOffice will insert the TOC at the cursors position.

As you can see here the TOC is gray. The gray color stands for special fields inside a text. Now just right click into the gray text. A context menu will open. One option is: “Update Index”. So if you have written new text or changed the structure of your document just click on “Update Index” and the TOC should be up to date.

I hope this short howto helped you a little bit. For MS Office it is nearly the same (I guess and hope). Maybe the names of the dialogs and menus are different. If you wan’t to know more or if you habe ideas for other topics just post a question (after registering).

Have fun!