Thanks, Remy. I'm very familiar with that use of conditional text. [My wife is 
also a teacher, and also depends on the LO-user in the house to help when 
things get moderately complex. ;-) ]

The problem comes not when I can specify a switch (like "User" == "Teacher" or "Student"), but when 
merging external data -- where a field may be either empty or instantiated -- to control a section of conditional text. Is there 
some way to do "IF-EXISTS" or "IF-BLANK" test on a field?

I appreciate your response,
John

On 2021-01-01 12:49, Remy Gauthier wrote:
Greetings,
You can use a section to do that in WRITER. The easy way to start is to highlight the text and then Insert > Section. In the section configuration, there is a conditional "Hide" you can use. For example, I created my wide's course material using WRITER and I use a variable named "User"; this variable is used on the cover page to indicate "Teacher's version" or "Student's version" (the value of User is Teacher or Student). The document contains the homework and practice exams the students will need to do throughout the semester. In the "Student's version", each question is followed by a blank area or by empty lines to allow them to write the answer to the question. In the "Teacher's version", each question is followed by a detailed answer. The way I did this was to create two sections after each question: the first section is for the detailed answer, and is hidden if 'User eq "Student"'. The second section contains the space needed for the students to write their answer; this section is hidden if 'User neq "Student"'. This way, I can flip between versions by changing the value of the variable.

There is more information here: https://help.libreoffice.org/3.3/Writer/Hiding_Text 
<https://help.libreoffice.org/3.3/Writer/Hiding_Text>

There are multuple ways of doing what you are looking for, but I believe 
sections are more flexible.

I hope this helps.
Rémy.

Le vendredi 01 janvier 2021 à 09:53 -0500, John Kaufmann a écrit :
WordPerfect has a very useful condition for conditional text that must be 
possible in Writer, but I have not figured out how to implement: How to hide a 
block or section of text (or frame/figure/table/etc) unless one or more 
instances of a class (to which that text pertains) exist. Is there a way of 
expressing the condition
   "If: a field {IS|IS NOT} BLANK"
that can be used in the condition to hide or expose relevant text?


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