and will somebody please explain how to use ask.libreoffice
Just the way you do: ask a question and hope someone will notice and answer it. Remember that AskLibreOffice is not incorporated organisation but only a volatile set of enthusiastic users eager to help others. Our skills are varied: one will know better Writer than Calc etc., as are our experiences (some here are real beginners having suffered from the problem just presented, others can be considered as experts in advanced use).
have no idea whether or not any of them have been answered
Indeed, the third-party software under the site hood is presently not optimally responding. In particular, the notification feature is severely in a degraded state (see this question but the software author recently promised to have a look at it. We hope the notifications will be back to normal in a near future.
Notifications (when working) can be controlled from your account page. You can enable e-mail notification. Otherwise, whenever there is an update to your question (an answer, a comment or an update to both) or to a question where you posted an answer or comment, a red envelope icon appears aside your pseudo in the top header of the page you are looking at. Click on it and you will display the list of relevant notifications.
You can also access your account page which list all your questions and see if they have answers.
I have asked questions several times
From your account page, there is only one question besides this one and user @petermau gave you an answer the same day you asked. Perhaps you registered on this site under several aliases? Why not but not a good idea because you won’t accumulate “karma points” on a single account and won’t acquire fast higher privileges.
how do I choose tags?
They the worst aspect of this site. They are not clearly explained. However, one of the following tags is mandatory to categorise the question and allow candidate answerers to select which one to read (fitting his skills or interest):
- writer, calc, draw, impress, math, base: designate the component with which you are encountering a difficulty
- common: if the problem is not related to a specific component but occurs with all, e.g. a printing driver/configuration issue
- meta: relates to issues beyond LO itself, such as this site UI or user-unfriendliness, road map, legal issues regarding LO use, etc.
The mandatory tag may be augmented with a more specific tag to narrow the problem description. Tags are used in tag-queries to find all questions related to some issues. You imagine that writer will result in thousands of questions while writer+paragraph+bullet will bring in a more manageable list to browse through.
Unfortunately, creating tags is free here. There is no synthetic list to choose from, which impedes the usefulness of the feature. For instance, some users will prefer the singular form paragraph while others will use plural paragraphs; some will tag list-style and others list+style (again with singular/plural variants).
Oviously, your question is erroneously tagged. So, I took the liberty to retag it.
what version should I have?
The latest available for your OS/distribution.
Since you didn’t mention your OS, I can’t be more specific. As a “non-techie”, always prefer some form of automatic installation/configuration such as those provided by the “package managers” (MacOS & Linux; Windows is a bit more manual and troublesome due to the proprietary lock-up attempts).
I keep getting a notice to update libre office
I don’t see what you mean. Ask a separate question with tag common+update and report precisely the messqge. Don’t forget your present LO version.
To show the community your question has been answered, click the ✓ next to the correct answer, and “upvote” by clicking on the ^ arrow of any helpful answers. These are the mechanisms for communicating the quality of the Q&A on this site. Thanks!
In case you need clarification, edit your question (not an answer which is reserved for solutions) or comment the relevant answer.
