Hi, I’m new to LibreOffice and have just downloaded version 24.2.5.2. At first this appeared to satisfy my needs where MS Word had failed yet again. I am trying to create tables that ultimately contain a large number of vertical and horizontal lines/arrows and a number of text boxes. I started by creating a nested table (two tables each with 3 columns side by side on A4 landscape) and copied and pasted lines of text from MS Excel to which I subsequently added more data and the arrows/lines/text boxes. All was fine with a single page but when I added a second page all of the arrows/lines/text boxes shifted to the extreme right after I saved the document. The first page still seems to be ok. I’m not sure that this software is the most appropriate for what I’m trying to achieve and would welcome suggestions. However if this is an appropriate use of the software I’m at a loss with what to do. I fully accept that this might just be my ignorance of the working of LO and that I’m trying to run before I can walk! I could attach the relevant file or a screenshot if I knew how! Kind Regards Peter
Please let us know which operating system you are using and which file format you are saving in. Thank you.
Comment on this comment from me and use the upload icon to upload your file.
Writer is meant to handle text (more exactly a text flow which will be split into pages as necessary).
Lines, arrows (or any graphical shape) and text boxes are external to text flow. They won’t cooperate well with your text. In particular, an arrow can be anchored to a paragraph but you can’t guarantee that the tip will point exactly to one character in all circumstances after edit.
Writer is controlled through styles (a collection of settings to apply to a paragraph, a character, a page, a frame or a list). This is your main tool to constraint text and “secondary areas” (frames) to given stable position. Unfortunately, graphical shapes (which are offered as a courtesy to avoid going to Draw to design simple illustrations) are not controlled by styles and therefore exhibit what beginners call instability.
Also, most people wrongly think that formatting manually a document is “intuitive” and easy. On the contrary this direct formatting requires super guru expert skills to be successful and, anyway, prevent comfortable formatting and layout adjustment. And all added shapes are extremely sensitive to direct formatting (and therefore don’t participate in automatic reflow).
In the present state of your question, we have absolutely no clue about your problem. Attach a sample file and describe accurately the expected result and the failure.
Hi, I’m running on Windows 11 and saving as .odt. I should have also mentioned that I’m also losing headers. I’ve uploaded the relevant file. Regarding the response from @ajlittoz , which I only partly understand, it would appear that I’m not using the most appropriate program so any suggestion for an alternative will be gratefully received. Kind Regards Peter
1-00 GWR Constituents (pages 1&2).odt (35.8 KB)
Hi, oops, I should have mentioned that this is a two page document; page 1 displays correctly, page 2 obviously doesn’t. Regards Peter
A general remark on the structure of the document: you complicated things a bit. Your layout is 2-column page with a vertical timeline. You decided to divide your page width through a two-column table with a single row, one per page. Then you nested a 3-column page inside each cell of the outer table.
This is not necessary.
- When you need 2 columns newspaper-style (text automatically flows from one column to the next), just configure the page style to request 2 columns.
- Tables in Writer are not constrained within the limit of a page. You can activate property Split table (and rows) across pages.
After having alook at your document, I consider is not a “narrative”. It has a main timeline to which events are attached. IMHO, this is more like a flowchart. Draw looks to me better fit for this task. If your document contains no narrative, it can be done totally with Draw. Otherwise, you’ll design as many page-sized partial drawings as needed and you’ll insert them into Writer as pictures.
I attach a mock-up of what can be done. The main “objects” are text boxes for time marks and event descriptions. These boxes are joined wit connectors which attach to glue points of the text boxes. With connectors (and not lines or curves), you can move the boxes and the connectors remaining attached to them are redrawn to adapt to the new geometric configuration.
There are tools to align objects relative to each other.
In the 1846 line, I used 2 connected connectors (one straight and one arrow) to link the text box and the date. This created an intermediate point to which I can attach the connectors from the merger below.
In Draw, every shape can have a label. Therefore I labelled one the merger connectors with (Amalgamated 1846). This means that whatever change you make to the drawing, this label will always follow the connector (it is not an independent text box).
AskLOTimeLine.odg (13.9 KB) will give you a rough idea of what can be done with Draw.
You can also apply styles (to be created) to the various elements so that the look can be modified centrally through changes in the styles (immediately transferred to so-styled objects).
Ajlittoz, hi, thank you for your prompt response. I’m inclined to agree that draw might be a better option if I was starting from scratch but all of my data is on spreadsheets and the method I’m using is the only way I could find to copy and paste into a better document - albeit that the copy/paste routine requires several stages. I have over 2000 lines of data which will result in dozens of pages and ideally I don’t want to start from scratch. Regards Peter
There may be some automated way if you give insight on your spreadsheet specification:
- what kind of data each column contains (semantically speaking, like name of company, year, …)
- how “dependent” company are designated (you use inden in Writer, but how is this coded in the spreadsheet?)
- how the “event arrows” are represented in the spreadsheet
- where the data for the “arrows” is stored in the spreadsheet
- …
ajlittoz, hi again, I’ve attached one of the smaller excel spreadsheets which is typical; some of the large ones have more than 200 lines and, whereas this one only uses the first two columns to provide the indentation others can be up to 4 columns for company names. The event arrows are as shown on the attachment - I have no idea where excel stores the data for these.
Example (Highland).xlsx (12.4 KB)
Regards Peter
I’m afraid I can be no help in this case.
The Excel spreadsheet presents the same defects as your Writer document: it is a mix of data in cells and drawing objects. It is not structured.
The semantic relationship between bits of data is shown by a “visual illusion” created by the addition of the drawing objects (which are independent of any other data). The angluar arrow are themselves made of several straight lines which are not “internally” connected.
The only implied relationship is the indents between columns A, B, … to trace mergers. Eventually this could be used with the non-void cells in column M to build the timeline. I think that the arrows can be implied by the indents but I don’t know how to retrieve data in the text boxes supposed to be associated with the arrows.
I saved the spreadsheet as CSV to see what could be extracted from it with an automated process. Of course, textboxes and their data are lost. However, I think that a macro-generator could use the CSV to generate a Graphviz description of your time line. Graphviz is a utility to build graphs from a very concise description (like node A connects to node B).
I have not enough spare time to experiment but it could be a path to follow.
Ajlittoz, many thanks for trying, regards Peter