Writer problem on upgrade to v6

[dragnil]

I’ve been a user since the days of Open Office but my needs are as few as my years are many! Version 5 did all I wanted (and more) but I upgraded to the latest a week ago and have just found a problem.

I had created a couple of user paragraph styles, simple to an expert but I can no longer remember how I did it. One placed a continuous line under a blank line of text as a separator and the other did something similar above the line.

My mistake was to try to copy the style properties to a new one and after a lot of confused effort, I’ve deleted the styles altogether. May I ask a short list of questions and ask for any help to be as easy to understand as possible ;o)

1. Should I, could I, revert to v5?

2. v5 is still on my laptop and using these styles - could I export/import them to my PC?

3. Can I recover styles from the file shown here, I seems to rember a “copy styles from existing” or similar.

Thanks for any and all help available to an old bloke who uses about 2% of the features of this excellent software.

David

[ajlittoz]

1. You can of course work with an outdated no longer maintained version, but you’re on your own. If you stumble on bugs or shortcomings, no fix will be applied. Unless your PC is too old to accept the current version, keep up-to-date to benefit from the improvements and new features. Remember also that ODF standard evolves with time and you may risk to see your old files incompatible with newer LO versions. Upgrading files is much more difficult when too many versions have elapsed.

2. Transfer your files from your laptop to your PC. Styles are stored inside files. I assume you don’t use templates. Transferring templates would be the only thing to do.

3. Transfer the files shown to your PC (beware not overwriting existing ones with same name). To recover your styles from another file, display the side stylepane (F11 or Styles>Manage Styles). At rightmost position in the toolbar, there is a small downward pointing triangle. Click it and Load Styles. Press From File button to select the source of the styles.

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.

[dragnil]

Thank you for your early help. I know I should stay up to date but I’m stumbling blindly here.
I thought I’d mafe progress - made a copy of the template and pasted the entries of the “wrong” file into it. Lo and behold my “Lineunder” style worked and all was well. Saved and exported as a pdf and it was all wrong. Somehow, in my experimentation I’d modified the style. I trhink I can see where I’m going, just. I’ll post more when I have more clarity. Thanks again
David

[dragnil]

Thanks for your advice, all is well now, I’m very grateful.

[ajlittoz]

Thanks for the feedback, but on this site answers are reserved for real solutions. The “standard” way to tell problem is over is to click on the gray check mark (only once even if seemingly nothing happens) at left of relevant answer;

Be kind enough to click on the more linkk under your answer to repost as comment under the relevant answer.