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OpenOffice.org Off-the-Wall: ToCs, Indexes and Bibliographies in OOo Writer

Jan 04, 2005  By Bruce Byfield
 in
A new way of thinking about and tagging a document's table of contents and other supporting features makes sense and is more convenient.
Conclusion

If you have trouble wrapping your mind around the way that Writer lumps ToCs, indexes and bibliographies together, think of them as variations on cross-references. Like a cross-reference, an index or table entry requires a source and a reference to the source. This sounds like a blazingly obvious statement, yet it is one that other word processors have missed altogether. By uniting several separate actions under the same conceptual framework, Writer simplifies all of them. The result is an easy-to-use and highly customizable set of tools.

Resources

"OpenOffice.org Off-the-Wall: Style Is Everything, Right?"

" OpenOffice Off-the-Wall: Bullet Proof Templates"

______________________

-- Bruce Byfield (nanday)

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Reopen the file........... all changes gone

faisal's picture
Submitted by faisal (not verified) on Tue, 04/22/2008 - 06:28.

i craated a ToC with a level upto 3
The ToC get updated
Now i saved the document
But when re opened the same
again the ToC is been evaluavted upto level 9
Why this?

multiple indexes?

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 11/16/2006 - 01:02.

If i add one index, and the an index for images only, i get everything messed up. as soon as i edit the second index, the first one gets shitted all over.

i tried creating one of "user specific" type instead of "table of content", but then, i'd need at least three user specific categories, since i have images, tables and graphics. and OO only fives me one.

deleting entries

David Paenson's picture
Submitted by David Paenson (not verified) on Sat, 02/05/2005 - 09:36.

I find your explanations very helpful.
I do however have a question: Is there a way of deleting all the entries in the text body itself in one go?
Plaese help.

For a better write up on OOo Writer

Ed Matthews's picture
Submitted by Ed Matthews (not verified) on Thu, 01/06/2005 - 20:09.

To read a book written by a writer for writers, check out
http://www.taming-openoffice-org.com/ a resources page by Jean Hollis Weber, of Australia. Her book on OOo Writer gives you a great how-to on using the advanced features of OOo described in this article.

Just wanted to clarify "bette

Ed Matthews's picture
Submitted by Ed Matthews (not verified) on Thu, 01/06/2005 - 20:13.

Just wanted to clarify "better".
First, I'm very glad to see an article about these features in something besides MS Office Word, b/c while there are a lot of features in MS Word, they are pretty darn kludgy.

Jean's book is just that, a book, a bit more complete and structured than the article. My use of "Better" just means more in depth, a good jumping off place if this article has piqued your interest. Thanks for helping spread the word about OOo.

cheers. no offense meant.

Proofreading

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 01/05/2005 - 05:42.

I love these OpenOffice articles to death, and hope they keep coming, but this one needed some serious proofreading something fierce.

pretty unhelpful

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 01/05/2005 - 09:40.

As someone with experience beyond the beginner's level using computers and word processors, I would never guess I could find an article on using a word processor so confusing. Is this an example of the notion that *any* documentation is better than none, regardless of how unhelpful it may be? Too bad the apparently useful features of this program cannot be better disambiguated than this. I really, really need to learn better how to use OOo Writer and its advanced features, but articles like this make me just throw up my hands in exasperation. It's almost as if I read nothing at all.

pretty unhelpful: How, specifically?

Randy Kramer's picture
Submitted by Randy Kramer (not verified) on Sun, 01/09/2005 - 11:41.

I found the article quite readable but possibly because I was very familiar with the (very) similar features in Word (97 for example).

You would do a lot of us a service if you could go into more detail about what was difficult to understand, and, if possible, why.

Aside: Some articles I find difficult to understand because a lot of time is spent on the details without enough time on the overall pieces and how they fit together. I thought this author did an adequate overview in the first section of the article.

Besides: If you have specific things you don't understand, maybe someone can help you.

Just for the heck of it, here's how I'd summarize a few of the high spots of the article:

* OOWriter can create TOCs, indexes, tables of figures, etc.
* The approach is to go through the document and tag what you want to be included in those tables, then do some processing to create the tables. (Except that headings can automatically be included in the TOC (did it say or am I guessing:) by virtue of an attribute in the styles for various level headings.
* There are no built-in styles for the resulting tables--you have to do some amount of formatting of the tables, especially if you want a result different than the default.

Then there are some detailed instructions of how to do at least some of those steps in the document.

What more could you want?

Try the other way

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 01/06/2005 - 10:17.

If you complain about the explaination that someone FOR FREE gives you, and you're not forced to read it, then I suggest you to try the other way: learn it by yourself and write a bettere article... :)
Then you'll acquire the right to complain, but NOT before... :)

Terrible response

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 05/17/2007 - 06:35.

That is the most ludicrous, bullshit reasoning I think I've ever heard. If something is crap, then it's crap. Free has nothing to do with it. If your logic is that if you think the article is shit then you should write a better one defeats both the language of criticism and the fact if you don't know how to do something just how are you going to write it? What your saying is that because something is free negates criticism is the key reason free software will never be taken seriously.

I thought it was me, but afte

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 01/05/2005 - 11:10.

I thought it was me, but after I read you response, I felt much better.
The author just learned this OOo powerful feature and wanted to let everybody know about it. What he forgot is that they might want to understand it and learn how to use it. He could have structured the article a little better to make it a littler more clear.

Hmmmmm

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 01/10/2005 - 11:42.

Is that like having it be a little clearer?

This is not a How-To

Janet Swisher's picture
Submitted by Janet Swisher (not verified) on Fri, 01/07/2005 - 15:12.

This article describes what the ToC, etc., features can do, but it mostly doesn't tell you how to do it. So if you were looking for a how-to, you will be disappointed in this article.

There is a chapter on ToC's, Indexes, and Bibliographies in the OOoAuthors Writer Guide:
http://www.oooauthors.org/groups/authors/userguide/writerguide/

It provides a much more step-by-step description of using these features.

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