I’m working on a book with 2 books in one. I want to change the headers when I start the second book. When I click on the first header, it appears to have a title, like it’s already been named. ( I used the format from my first book, which was done in OpenOffice ). SO how can I do this, please?
You have to understand styles. Read these tutorials:
https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=44607
https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=1221
It’s the “counter intuitive” that makes me crazy. I have a part time home business, and am trying to write a book, so I don’t have time to mess with having to study a word processing program. What’s the most intuitive of word processors? Microsoft Office? Because I’ll lose more money if I have to study Libre, than if I find an intuitive WP and just pay for that.
My priority is efficiency, not intuitiveness. That’s why I use primarily LibreOffice. And that’s why I can’t answer your question.
Whatever you think, no application is “intuitive”. “Intuition” is a word coined for adequation between education and need. In any case you must understand a few basic principles which are the roots of said application. Have you estimated the net gain between the time devoted to study, even superficially, LO essentials plus the time to use it efficiently and the time wasted starting writing your book fiddling here and there trying to make things fit together with trials and many errors?
If your book is related to your home business, you’d better write it “professionally”. This means: use styles. They bring real ease of maintenance of the text and versatility in formatting. Yes, they force you to organize your thought and plan ahead instead of diving head first into writing (by the way, you did learn how to swim, which is rather counter-intuitive, before jumping into the pool). But that’s already part of the job and not at all a mess.
That said, the answer to your question is page style. Whenever you have “independent” parts in a document (chapter, book, …), give them their own page style. A page style defines its own margins, header, footer and many others (like notes properties).
You activate a page style with a break. The break can be manual (Insert>Manual break) where you select the page style for the pages after the break, or automatic through an ad hoc organisation of paragraph styles. But automation is only possible once you master the available features (and LO is particularly feature-rich).
At least, use the built-in help. It is not perfect but it exists, is always available and already brings useful information.
Couldn’t disagree more about “intuitiveness” (which is different from “intuition”.)
There were two publishers of Ohio Revised Code statutes. They were identical - except for the Indices. Now, presumably, I carried the same education and experience into reading each one when I did it on the same day in the same place.
Guess what? I could locate ANYTHING from the Baldwin’s index version and couldn’t find Jack in the Andersons index.
So, yes- Intuitive applications exist. Consider the difference between Apple (non-intuitive) and Windows (intuitive) or iOS (non-intuitive) or Android (intuitive) unless, of course, you fall into the other experience of Apple being intuitive and non-Apple being - not.
So I would suggest, respectfuly, that you take better care not to install your opinon (“Whatever you think, no application is “intuitive”. “Intuition” is a word coined for adequation between education and need.”) versus others’ actual, real life experiences, especially when people with graduate degrees and scientific degrees are your readers.
@janehull: Anybody feels at ease with what (s)he has used for ages. Time passing, it becomes such “second nature” that it gets called “intuitive”. No matter the tool (Windows, Apple, iOS, Android, Linux, Multics, Plan 9, …), changing for another one is painful because no tool is an exact duplicate of the former one (and even from one release to the next of any application, there are differences you must learn and cope with).
Since you claim to have graduate and scientific degree, you are able to introspect and think about the consequences of a tool change. You surely understand the implications and the need to read, even superficially, the release notes to discover the usage guidelines of an application and to compare them to your current procedures and see how they should be adapted.
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I’m fine with that and do not dispute some of your observations; however if I think of the first time I opened the Revised Code, I got nowhere with the red book. The blue ones- same library, same day, same statute, same library table? Entirely different results. Whoever built that index categorizes things the way I do. The person writing the red index did not. I could use one and not the other. It is true as well with the various online services because of the search engines they choose to use. (Funny side note- when it came to online statutory access, it was the Red Book I was able to use with near immediate facility and I never went back to the blue books.)
It happened similarly with my use of a PC. The first exposure was to an Apple. Didn’t get it the UI. Hated the UI. Didn’t like not knowing where the actual files were stored. I did think that it was a better built operating system than Windows which strikes me as indicative that my experience and my understanding were two different things. The Windows OS UI just made sense to me on day one. Here’s the file name. Here’s the file path. It’s not some fantasy pointer- it’s the real file.
So I am specifically not speaking about someone who is using the same tool for a period of time and, yes, gets too used to it to be able to look at it with an unbiased eye. I am specifically speaking about a user’s first experience with a thing- anything from a new food to a different type of hammer to a different binding on a book or a different binding mechanism on a notebook. It’s that initial experience which is capable of being “intuitive". It seems that it’s sort of by definition outside of the intuitive realm when it is something one is familiar with. And that includes the (generally) minimal adjustments with releases of software. Isn’t that why we have v7.2, v7.3, tweaks, and v8 suggesting a fairly major overhaul either in the application or the UI?
It seems that you and I are looking at different types of things and user experiences to appreciate the concept of “intuition” and “intuitive” which, as I said, are not the same thing. “The ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.” vs “Using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive.”
Good talk. Interesting to think about.
Not really appreciating your implication that I am a liar, though. Real offputting.
Where do you take I suggest you’re a liar? This is not my intention. I may have used a word which you misinterpreted but English is not my native language and it is always possible (and even very likely) that I use one in a wrong context or with a faulty meaning.
What has always struck me is the absence of psychological impact in computer usage. This aspect is never considered though everybody comes with his own “culture” or background.
Yourself emphasise it in your first experience contact with a “thing”. I agree this is the most difficult moment if there is no preparatory “introduction”, i.e. you just dive into it to see what it looks like. The only reference you have is your own background. This is probably what you call “intuitiveness”: facing the unknown, you expect support from whatever you know, often in unrelated knowledge fields.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t work with most computer programs, all the more with Free and Open Source Software where documentation, including basic user doc, is often lacking or deficient. Add to that reading the doc is an extra voluntary action postponing the time when you really start experimenting with the application.
Getting back to LO Writer, it is based on not-so-common principles which you can’t guess on first contact, rightly because they aren’t shared by the competition. It took me ages to think over these principles (which are not exposed in any doc) and build a mental model (I don’t know if it matches the technical model of the developers) useful enough to tame the application. But this is only half of the problem. The second half, the most important one, is structuring your approach to book/document writing, i.e. author role. The main task of an author is to communicate ideas, notions, concepts, … in short meaning. An auther should focus his/her attention on significance, not on formatting. LO Writer allows to fully separate contents from rendering and this is its superiority against M$ Word where this can’t be done. I use the style system as a markup device to annotate my text with the value I attach to words, sequences, paragraphs, pages, … as “emphasis”, “irony”, “comment”, “glosis”, “explanation”, “translation”, “quotation”, … Note that I write no where “bold”, “italics”, … These are related to rendering, not to meaning.
This approach requires a huge change of mind but it pays off in the end allowing you to publish several versions of the same document (pocket format, A4, e-pub, …) simply by changing the styles, never needing to check contents. Of course, you don’t achieve it on first try; this is not intuitive at all (though the markup looks quite “natural” from an author point of view), you need to practice a lot before tuning your configuration. But afterwards, you have an unsurpassed flexibility.
LO Writer is a very complex product. There are mitigation features to partially bridge the gap but these features, which are a tribute to a well-known competitor, curtain the founding principles and many people have not the curiosity to raise the curtain.
For someone who is not a native English speaker youre fluency is amazing. It surpasses that of many (if not most) native American-English speakers. I see what you are saying and I agree. The application itself is amazong. I am grateful that I found the assistance this site provides. Thank you.
By way of explaining, “Since you claim to have graduate and scientific degree” seems to imply that it is not true rather than simply expressing your inability to know whether ot not it is true. That’s what seems to be the disconnect. If I were being polite I would say “With your education it should be easy for you to introspect and think about the consequences of a tool change.” This accepts what I say by way of implication rather than casting a doubt over whether or not what I said is true. Listening to a lot of amazingly fluent ESL speakers in the world, it is surprising to me how many idioms are common across even language families and yet non-existant in English.
One example is the use of the word “Inside”. We(Am Eng) tend to mean that something separates the inside from the outside. Otherwise it is “In.” Put the potatoes in the pot vs. put the potatoes inside the pot. “Go play inside; it is raining.” as opposed to “Get in- it’s raining”.What tells me that this is an English thing is that this “inside” elocution is used by Arabic, Romance, Slavic, and Asian ESL speakers. Another word that doesn’t seem to translate well, idiomatically, is “since” as opposed to “for” “Since a long time” = ESL “For a long time”= typical native idiom.
Speaking as someone whose foreighn language experience is high school French and Fortran IV (seriously- my undergraduate foreign language compnenet was fulfilled by one semester of Fortran) I am humbled at the command over English the greater international community has.
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Ok, thanks! I read up and understand it now. The only hang up I have now, is how to inherit a new page style from the last one. The Inherit option isn’t available.
Correct, you can’t derive page styles from other page styles, so you have to copy all changes that you made to the default page style, for instance orientation and margins.
On this message board you should add a comment when you reply to an answer given to your question, you should only post an answer when you find the solution yourself. You can edit the original question to add information.
My test document is a mess now. I cant get it to start another page 1 in the footer of the second page style.
Restarting a page number sequence is done in the page break inserted to switch to the new page style. If the page break is manually inserted, you can’t edit it to add the page number reset option. Delete it and reinsert it with the desired attributes. If the break is set in the Text Flow tab of a paragraph style, edit the paragraph style and document updates “magically”.