Multiple document tricks
Sunday August 01, 2004; part of: OOo

One of the less finished, potentially useful bits of Openoffice is the Navigator. It ought to let you move and link multiple documents to your heart's content, showing the structure of each one as it does so, with headings, bookmarks, notes, and so on.

It almost does; and almost works as an outliner. Here are the tricks I use when assembling radio scripts from eight different interviews, put here partly so I remember them next time I make a radio programme.

  • To get a listing of all open files, right click on an empty space. This shows all of them. The silly file list at the bottom only shows four at a time.
  • Clicking on a displayed bookmark in another document does nothing, though you can drag it into the one you're working on
  • Double-clicking on a heading displayed from another document will open the other document at once in the main window at the heading you choose.
  • In tools -> outline numbering, set the outline level of default/normal text to 10. Then the first line of every par shows up in the Navigator jsut as it can be set to show in Word.

Interesting posts resume shortly.

Posted by andrewb at August 01, 2004 10:21 AM
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Textile formatting works here. Double hyphens are automatically converted to en dashes, quotes are automatically smartened. You can put dashes and asterisks around text to make italics bold and other silly effects easily.
  • Text wrapped in Asterisks which * will be bold. The asterisks must touch each end of the bold text. There must a space before the first and after the last.
  • Text wrapped in underscores - _ - will be italicised. The underscores must touch each end of the italics. There must a space before the first and after the last.
  • Paragraphs starting bq. will be block quoted. There must be no space before the "b" and one space after the full stop.
  • A hyperlink is made by wrapping the link text in double quotes, followed immediately by a colon, then the URL. If there is a question mark in the URL, wrap the whole lot in square brackets.
  • I use two classes to mark up text that deserves it. sane text looks like this. loony text looks like that. The syntax for those is %(sane)[space] sane text %; loony is left as an exercise to the reader.
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