Introducing Writer
This is Chapter 1 of the OpenOffice.org 3 Writer Guide produced by the OOoAuthors group.
A PDF of this chapter is available from this wiki page. The PDFs are up to date for the second edition of the book and the wiki is being updated.
What is Writer?
Writer is the word processor component of OpenOffice.org (OOo). In addition to the usual features of a word processor (spelling check, thesaurus, hyphenation, autocorrect, find and replace, automatic generation of tables of contents and indexes, mail merge, and others), Writer provides these important features:
- Templates and styles
- Page-layout methods, including frames, columns, and tables
- Embedding or linking of graphics, spreadsheets, and other objects
- Built-in drawing tools
- Master documents—to group a collection of documents into a single document
- Change tracking during revisions
- Database integration, including a bibliography database
- Export to PDF, including bookmarks
- And many more
Styles are central to using Writer. Using styles, you can easily format your document consistently and change the format with minimal effort. A style is a named set of formatting options. Writer defines several types of styles, for different types of elements: characters, paragraphs, pages, frames, and lists. Often, you are using styles whether you realize it or not. The use of styles is described in more detail in Chapter 6 (Introduction to Styles) and Chapter 7 (Working with Styles).
The other features of Writer listed above are also covered in detail in other chapters of this guide.
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