What is Writer?

What Is Writer?

Writer is the word processor component of Apache OpenOffice. 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 (see Chapter 2)
• 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 (see Chapter 9)
• And many more

These features are covered in detail in the Writer Guide.

Using Mail Merge

Writer provides very useful features to create and print:

• Multiple copies of a document to send to a list of different recipients (form letters)
• Mailing labels
• Envelopes

All these facilities use a registered data source (a spreadsheet or database containing the name and address records and other information).

Chapter 11 (Using Mail Merge) in the Writer Guide describes the process.