Formatting Text in Open Office
How you format your documents, spreadsheets and presentations can be very important if you’re looking at making a big impact that really is noticeable. If all of the text you write looks exactly the same, it can become boring to read and that isn’t what you want. In this article, we’ll give you more information in how you can format your text in Writer, Calc and Impress, all part of the Open Office suite. Keep on reading if this is what you’re looking for.
Writer
Writer can be used to write very long reports which is why you need to make sure that the formatting is up to scratch to enable people to read it with ease. Luckily, there are some very easy ways of doing this. Headings are a great way to separate sections of your document, you can do this by highlighting the titles and then increasing the font size, found in the navigation at the top. You can also make the text bold and underlined through this which could be a good idea. If you need to change the font, you can do it from the same menu.
Using other techniques such as bullet points and text aligning can also be a good way of making your documents more interesting. Both of these options are available instantly and can be found in the toolbars just above your document. Furthermore, images can be another way of making them more readable, the quickest way of adding these is to simply copy an image and then go to Edit –> Paste and add the image directly to the report. Most of the tools available to you can be accessed at the click of a button in the toolbars.
Calc
You should find that the process is actually very similar in Calc, too. However, in this scenario you probably won’t be able to add images as the main focus in a spreadsheet is the figures which are displayed. For that reason, you may decide to use a large header at the top, which you can do by changing the font and style in the toolbar. Charts are an excellent way of getting your points across too – luckily, there’s an in-built chart generator in the software which would be a great thing to use.
Something which a lot of people decide to use is called conditional formatting. This is where the styling of your spreadsheet changes depending on the figures you enter. We already have a tutorial on how to do this on our website so if you’re interested you may want to consider using this. We do recommend that you highlight the most important figures, such as sales totals, in a different font color. This is very easy to change, a color such as red would be appropriate.
Impress
The focus of a presentation is not of the amount of text you write, but the points you make. You should always try to include as least text as possible and try to make it more appealing by adding images, video and sound. Open Office gives you the tools you need to do this so let’s give you our best tips on how you can format the information in your presentation to make the best use of the office suite. Our first recommendation is to use very large and bold titles on every slide which will let your users know what you’re trying to talk about.
If you want to add multimedia into your presentations, this would be a great thing to do and it is actually very easy. If you load up Open Office and go into the Impress software, you should find that if you go into the Insert menu in the navigation bar at the top, you’ll be able to add everything that you’re looking for. When you decide to add videos, it’s also a good idea to put it on its own slide otherwise your users may not be able to see it with text wrapped around it. Either way, you should do a lot of testing with Open Office and your presentation itself first to make sure you get the optimized and best formatted layout for you.
Conclusion
In conclusion, no matter how you want to format your text, you should find that Open Office gives you the flexibility to do so. There is support for many different features that can be used, such as using different fonts, colors and sizes to make sure that your documents have the desired effect without you having to work too hard to get it. There are many other layout formatting techniques you could use, too, such as tables but that will be discussed in a separate article. For now, you should know how to format your text using the advice we’ve given to you in this article. Open Office is an office suite that shouldn’t be missed.
Tags: calc, formatting, impress, writer
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