Luke's LibreOffice Hacks

We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. Scenario You have a single document that references important sections of several other documents. You want to be able to move swiftly between the single document and all the reference documents. To do that, you might use a Document Link in Writer (for instance) : Highlight the word(s), sentence or paragraph in the source document that you want to link to the reference document. Click on the Link icon in the Writer Menu Bar. Search for, Select and Open the document to which you wish to connect. The hyperlink will appear in the Link field of the Hyperlink dialog box. (Optionally, and assuming the reference document contains bookmarks, you can search for those in the next field and get a very targeted location later when you click on the link). Right-click somewhere in...

We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As always, if you don't want to be bored by the Scenario, simply jump to the Instructions portion below. Scenario: I download a ton of public domain books and other publications that I use for research and republication. Though I try to be disciplined and meticulous in categorizing the downloads into numerous folders and sub-folders, with more than 10,000 files I find myself doing a lot of searches for certain words or phrases in certain files within certain folders. Here's an illustrative example. I have a single word I am looking for because it has been, for 75 years, a hot topic in general public discourse (let's say, so as not to offend anyone, the word is :"blooper.") Then I want to export or copy and paste the search results (list of files...

Microsoft Word has a built-in Style Separator function that allows the user to mix two different styles in the same paragraph; LibreOffice, as of the date of this post, does not have the same capability. Below is a comment I appended to the bug number referenced in the subject line of this post. I'm sure I will be kicked out of the forum…again.  If you don't care to read a snarky vs. snarky post, here is the summary: First, LibreOffice Writer does not have a Style Separator function and the Document Foundation does not (at this time) intend to develop one. Second, the alternatives suggested by the devs and by users in the forum are clever but worthless to the serious user. "This is an ongoing issue that has been reported in at least two separate bug reports and the developers have responded, once with "there are ways to accomplish this without developing an actual style separator" (my description) and, in this bug report, "Looks like this is a bit of an obsc...

In LibreOffice Writer, there is an option for defining how much space a footnote can occupy on a page…but it is an option in theory only. In actuality, the function is quirky and The Document Foundation has, to my knowledge, never come up with a reason for the problem, not to mention a fix for it. The scenario (see images above) Let's say that you have a fairly long document and you want your footnotes to be numbered consecutively for the entire document, and you want your footnotes to appear at the end of each page. So far, so good. You have discovered how to make that happen by going to Tools, Footnotes and Endnotes, and doing the set-up there. But how do you make sure that your footnotes do not break across pages? Do this: Click on Format, Page Style, Footnote. In "Footnote Area" click on "Not Larger Than Page Area," then click on Okay. The problem Following the instruction above works under special circumstances only, which are defined on the LibreOffice Hel...

First let me give you a straight answer, unlike the (nonsense)-answer you will find on the LibreOffice Online Help pages.  Here is the original question as found on the LO Help Pages site 6 years ago (it appears that nothing has changed and nothing has been done about this "closed" issue since 2015). How to change background color of comment(ctrl+alt+c) & is there any other feature like comment that can be hide-unhide “on click”? I found in options, it allows to change the bright yellow color of notes in Spreadsheet. Which option do i use to change bright yellow color of comment in Impress? Straight-forward Answer :  Changing the background color of comment boxes in Writer and Impress cannot be done. Period.  Forget about all the LO Help replies that explain how each user of a shared document is assigned a different color for his/her comments; that has nothing to do with the simple question as originally stated. And  the suggestion that frames can be used to ma...

Our Standard Cautionary Tale on Forums There is a lot of useless junk in forums that purport to tell you how to fix the memory issues in LibreOffice. Most of them are useless because many of the fixes are based on old, outdated versions of LO, say, for instance, version 5.0 or lower. They are also useless because there is always a lot of speculation and guessing taking up space in a forum.  The fixes below cut through the useless junk, and they simply work. We assume that you are on an updated version of LO, such as 6.5 or higher, thus many of the improvements to memory settings are already baked into LO.  Skip the Details For those who don't need all the "what's" and "why's," skip to the highlighted fixes for items 5 and 6 below. Background In earlier versions (see above) of LibreOffice (nee, OpenOffice), memory settings caused the program to react slowly or not at all, depending on the task you were executing. Most of those freezes and crashes had to d...

 It seems like a lot of people struggle with this task that should be fairly simple. Let's solve it. Problem : In LibreOffice Writer, the numbers in your numbered list are not bold, and you cannot figure out how to make them bold. You created a numbered list, but the list numbers are not bold. You tried all sorts of ways to make the number bold, with no luck. That's because there is a simple, but somewhat obscure way to make the numbers bold in LO Writer. Once you learn it, you won't forget. Numbered list, but list number itself is not bold Solution :  After you have created your numbered list, right-click in the first numbered paragraph. Select "Bullets and Numbering," then "Bullets and Numbering" again in the drop-down. In the "Bullets and Numbering" dialog box that pops up, select the "Customize" tab. Click on the "Character Style" drop-down box and select "Strong Emphasis," then click okay. Numbered list, list ...