As my title may suggest, I’m not even sure how to search for what I need. I’m pretty sure I could do this in MS Word some ages ago:
I’d like to create some text that I can re-use, like autotext. But this text would behave like a field, so that when I alter the original text, later instances (where I just insert the field) update automatically.
Does LibreOffice Writer have this ability? If so, how do I look this up? Thanks very much.
Select the text that you want to reuse
Click Insert - Bookmark, give it a suitable name.
To insert the text somewhere else, click Insert - Field - More fields - Cross references. Select Bookmarks, select referenced text then select your named bookmark and click Insert.
If you change the original text then the cross reference will also change
Thanks so much. Three notes:
In order to actually create the bookmark, you need to click INSERT after you give it a name.
Also, a bookmark seems to be limited to one paragraph at a time.
Last, if I do alter the source text, I have to press F9 to update the field.
None of this is very surprising. I can definitely work with all of that.
Many many thanks again.
Internally Bookmarks and Cross-references are the same. The difference is in intended usage. Bookmarks are rather oriented towards navigation inside your document while “xrefs” are pointers or recalls inside your text for readers.
When you modify the origin of the bookmark or xref, take care not to erase or change the extent of the definition. This is the weakness of the feature.
To avoid unintentional erasure, you can define a custom property in File>Properties and repeatedly insert it into your document with a field. This works best for “constant” data like book revision number, company identification code, collaborative contributors name, copyright data, … But your “property” cannot span several paragraphs (it is merely text which will be incorporated to paragraph payload).
Thanks to you, too. Now that I’ve accomplished what I wanted to, I’ll have to go back and refine my appreciation of similar tools.
Cheers!