Tom Pendleton wrote:
Not surprizingly, the Outlook Express 6 e-mail
operation did not operate.
????
I am constantly amazed that Sun and other reputable
groups are associated with Open Office, which has so
many drawbacks that it makes MS Word look good!
If you don't like OpenOffice and don't like MS Word, is there any Word
Processor you do like? If so, then of course you can use it. Yet perhaps
you just need to become more familiar with OpenOffice to see its
virtues. Almost all complex applications have a learning curve and most
of us have been frustrated by new applications that won't do things
exactly they way we want think they should be done.
Help is basically helpless, and rarely tells the
reader what to do. When it does, it is often wrong or
at least ineffectual.
OOo Help is sometimes over concise. But I have often used it to my
profit. I will return to this point later.
Here are two of the most basic questions, which I
cannot find answers to.
1) How do I set the margins? The instructions in Help
do not help, not only because they are quite vague,
but what they do say to do does not work. (I go into
Format, Page, and set the margins, but it has no
effect on the document.)
Format -> Page is effects only the current page (or currently selected
pages), not the entire document, unless you have previously selected the
entire document. "Page" means Page formatting, not entire "Document"
formatting, unless you first select your entire document. OOo Writer is
not so primitive as to force the same margins or page settings on an
entire document.
A more structured solution is to press F11 to bring up the StyleList,
select the fourth icon on the Stylelist toolbar, select the "Default"
page style, right-click, select "Modify" and change the margins there.
Also, the current page style appears in the second display box in the
status bar at the bottom of an OOo Writer window. Right-clicking on that
box provides a list of available pages from which you can select a
different Page Style which will be immediately apply to the current page
or to the selected pages. Double-clicking on the Page Style box brings
up the dialog box for modifying the current page style, including
setting margins.
You can create a new default template with the "Default" page style
margin settings as you prefer and all future new documents will have the
"Default" page style set to those same margin settings. Similarly you
can change the margins and other features in the other page styles and
include those changes in your default template.
2) How do I change the default font away from the
awful, extremely outdated, Times New Roman? No matter
what I do, that repulsive typeface keep reappearing as
the default. I am ready to eliminate it from my list
of fonts, if that is the only way to end its
domination of the default.
Go to Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org Writer -> Basic Fonts (Western)
to change default Writer fonts at the top level of the style hierarchy.
Changes made here will cascade down.
You can also change them in the Stylelist (accessed via F11). Selecting
the first item provides a list of paragraph styles and selecting
"Hierarchical" in the list box at the foot of the Stylelist shows
clearly the current style hierarchy so that you can see which styles are
likely to be affected by any change that you make to a style higher in
the hierarchy. The top level paragraph styles are the same paragraph
styles listed in Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org Write -> Basic Fonts
(Western).
Both of these questions are so basic, yet have proven
impossible for me to answer, that it shows how
non-intuitive and difficult to use your product is.
There are not hundreds of people posting these same problems. On the
other hand, people, including myself, sometimes have odd difficulties
with the most trivial matters.
A difficulty many new users of OOo Writer have is that they skip over
anything to do with styles in the help and documentation, as
non-essential, as a complexity avoided by them up to know whenever they
have encountered it. Unfortunately for this kind of thinking, OOo Writer
is very style-based in the way it is set up. And generally, non-style
based word processing, web-publishing, and hard-publishing is today
mostly considered as clunky and out-of-date as you consider the Times
New Roman font to be.
You can, if you wish, provide constructive commentary on the Help files
at the main OpenOffice.org site, entering bug comments on the help
files, making clear what you found confusing. It is often difficult for
someone who knows something well to understand what might confuse a
newcomer and constructive criticism is usually appreciated.
Since you appear not to be subscribed to this newsgroup, a copy of this
post is being sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
Please reply or ask any further questions only at users&openoffice.org
Jallan
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