It has been a couple of month since you posted, but since it seems to be persistent problem of many users, here are a few ideas/solutions.
Unfortunately, to my knowledge there is not yet the possibility to select all footnotes at once (via Shift key or sim.) Possible workarounds depend on the goal you want to accomplish. There are 2 main reasons to select all Footnotes: 1.)To change their proprieties (Font, Style etc.) 2.)To export them, possibly to create a bibliography. *Warning, make backup of your original document, before performing changes you are not familiar with. 1.)Is fairly easy to accomplish, by changing the global properties of the style your Footnotes have (by default it should be Style: Footnote). No need to expressly select all the Footnotes for that. Type F11, or Format > Styles and Formatting. Right click your style (Footnote). The changes in the properties will have a global effect. In case your footnotes do not have a common Style, look at section a) and especially aa) of the second solution. 2.)For Footnotes export there are 2 workarounds I can think of: a.)Select all Footnotes To actually select all Footnotes at once, the Find and Replace Dialog offers you an ellegant workaround(Ctrl-F). Expand the 'More Options' Menu in the dialog and check the Search for Styles. Afterwards select the style(Footnote) you are looking for in 'Search for'. With 'Find All', OO Writer selects all instances of the Text, having the specified Style. By Copy and Pasting the highlighted text you can extract them all at once, with the obvious loss of new paragraphs. (they will form a continous text block, but they will keep their respective Formatting) You can however, clear out the new lines issue and obtain an impacable list in a matter of seconds, by using the power of REGEXP :). (description in aa.) at the bottom - refer to this part also in case your Footnotes don't have a common Style.) b.)Export the document & retrieve the footnotes The basic idea is to 'Save as' the document containing the footnotes, in some other format (f.e. txt) and then retrieve them with a simple text editor, and copy and paste them back into the Open Office document. Before doing it, you should group all your footnotes at the end of the document. Tools > Footnotes... and change the 'Position' of the Footnotes from 'End of page' to 'End of document'. It looks already perfect, unfortunately you still can't select all of them. Therefore 'Save as' the document. Often, the smart choice to do this is to save to .html and not to .txt, since the .html (sim. to the .rtf) keeps font formatting such as Italics etc. The .html file can be opened with any web browser and copy pasted back into your original document, after which you can select all of your footnotes, as any simple text. This is probably the default way you want to export your footnotes, and use the first method(a) only if the result obtained with (b) is for some reason not satisfying. aa.)Insert lines/delimiters with Regexp I suggest that you skimm over my the following examples and then get back and spend 15 minutes reading the following references. http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/How_Tos/Regular_Expressions_in_Writer or http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Regular.html#uh-7 *I'm sure you don't want to be forced to learn programming to use Office, but spend 15 minutes reading, to get an introductory idea about Regexp and you will be rewarded with a lifetime of luxury and professionalism in text searching. Highlight your new list that you copy&pasted somewhere. Open Edit > Find and Replace Dialog, Expand the More Options and check 'Current Selection Only' and 'Regular Expressions'. Carefully look at your footnotes and try to identify some sort of pattern in the Text, that identifies the beginning of a Footnote. To give you an Example: (I use the following Format to quote my sources: SURNAME, Name: Title..., Year.) Therefore I can find the beginning of a Footnote by looking for a pattern ".SURNAME" which equals "(a dot)(Capital letter)(more Capital letters)" which equals to the Regexp "\.[A-Z][A-Z]" Type the needed Regexp into the 'Search for' field and 'Find All' should highlight all the instances. In the 'Replace with' box you can enter the string you want the highlighted text to be changed for. The trick is to manage to insert a new paragraph between two characters (i.e. an addition, not a replacement). To perform this in my case, after highlighting the above mentioned parts in the text, you would check again 'Current Selection only' and 'Search for' "\." which is 'Replaced all' with the expression ".\n" (replacing all the dots, in the previous selection, for a dot AND a new paragraph) The example is meant to give you an idea on how the proceed. The actuall possibilities of Regexp are limited only by your imagination. (and by the fact that Writer does not support Regexp in the 'Replace with' field) If the Footnotes show the slightest sign of regularity, there is a way to exploit it with Regexp and save yourself some work. By using the same principle u can extract your footnotes independently of their Style, i.e identifying them with a Regexp. Footnotes like: "This is a very interesting source. <www.openoffice.org>" Can be summarized as "(Capital letter)(possibly more letters)(dot)(<)(letters)(>)" (Ideally your Regexp identifies all of your needed expressions, but not any other expressions.) Therefore by 'Searching for all' "^[A-Z]\.<.*>$" in 'Find and replace' would be a good beginning how to highlight all of these terms at once. Vlastimil Pis
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