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When you're writing in LibreOffice, do you ever repeat yourself? I said, “Do you ever repeat yourself?” Oh, sorry, I'm repeating myself. In Writer, especially in business writing, there is text you repeat often: greetings and closings in letters, address headers, enclosure statements, and disclaimers, are all examples of repeated text. At other times, you're just trying to design a layout for a newsletter or template, and you need some text to fill in the space so you will know what it looks like. This is where Auto Text is useful. This handy little utility makes it easy for you to repeat yourself without having to type it over and over again. You can open the Auto Text dialog with Edit > AutoText.
Predefined Auto Text Entries Auto Text comes with many predefined entries. There are four default categories, but you can add more. The three that already have entries are Business Cards, Work (3 ½ x 2); Only for Templates; and Standard. You will find a few gems in each of the categories. The business cards have several different predefined card styles. The different styles have placeholders for you to fill in with your information. Using fields, like placeholders, makes these very handy to use. The topic of placeholders is beyond this article, but you will learn about them soon. There are three elegant styles, and two modern styles. The templates category contains mostly layouts for different headers. The category contains both simple and complex header styles. There are also two for meeting minutes. These can give you a head start on setting a template for a newsletter or meeting notes. The Standard is a group of general inserts into a document. You'll find default greetings and closings, business document markup (like Attention, Enclosure, CERTIFIED MAIL), and a formula-numbering entry. Included in this category are several text placeholders. These are good when you're trying to design a newsletter or document layout. There is the aptly named Dummy Text, which is a 290 word paragraph. There is also the traditional Lorem Ipsum (a paragraph of “Latin” text). Finally, there are some starter texts for different situations, including job applications and debt-collection reminders.
Inserting Auto Text When it comes to inserting Auto Text, there are two methods: from the Auto Text dialog and using the shortcut. The shortcut method is the quickest by far, but let's take a look at both. When you have the Auto Text dialog open, you can select any of the entries and see the text in the preview window. Once you find the text you want to insert, just click the Insert button to insert the text into your document at the current cursor location. But who wants to open a dialog, find, and select a text entry? You will notice that each Auto Text entry has a name and a shortcut. You can quickly add the text by typing the shortcut for the entry and pressing the F3 key on the keyboard. For example, the shortcut for Lorem Ipsum is LOREM. If you type in LOREM and press the F3 key, Writer will insert the Lorem Ipsum text into your document. Note that while the shortcuts show in all capitals, Auto Text will recognize the shortcut even when in lower or mixed case.
Creating Auto Text Entries You can create your own Auto Text entries, so you can repeat yourself using your own words. You probably don't want to get too carried away here, but if you have something you type almost daily, you should consider creating an Auto Text. A good example is my journal entries, which I make every day. At the beginning of the day, I start the entry with a date and time stamp to identify when the entry was created. If I make another entry on the same day, I just throw in a time stamp. This involves going through the Insert menu to select the fields, but if I used Auto Text, I could enter a shortcut, press F3, and start typing my entry, which is what I like to do. Let's create the journal entry and time-stamp Auto Text entries, and then we will modify the journal entry to show how you can change an existing entry. In a new or existing document, Insert > Fields > Date and press enter. Insert > Fields > Time and press Enter. Highlight the date and time entries you just created in the document. Edit > Auto Text. Select the category My Auto Text. This is the only default category you can add entries to without adding your own categories. In the Name text box, type in Journal Entry. The shortcut should automatically set itself as JE. By default the shortcut is created by the first letter of each word in the name, but you can edit the shortcut should you want to change it from the default. Click the Auto Text button and select New from the drop-down menu. This will create an entry in the My Auto Text category named Journal Entry. Click close to exit the Auto Text dialog.
Now, test your new Auto Text entry. Type JE on a new line and press F3. You should get your new journal entry header. Because we used fields, the date and time will reflect the date and time of the moment you inserted the entry. To create the time-stamp, we just need the time, Insert > Fields > Time and press enter. Highlight the time entry you just created. Edit > Auto Text. Make sure the My Auto Text category is selected, and enter Time Stamp in the Name text box. The shortcut will set itself to TS. Click the Auto Text button and select New from the drop down menu. The Time Stamp entry is created in the My Auto Text category. Test the Time Stamp entry in the same manner as for the Journal Entry. About a week after creating my Auto Text entries, I was reviewing some past entries and thought, “It would be nice if the date showed the day of the week as well.” I decided I needed to change the Journal Entry Auto Text to include the day of the week. Let's see how I made the change. In a document, create a new Journal Entry (JE and press F3). Double-click on the date field to bring up the Edit Fields dialog. In the Format column, select the format Friday, December 31, 1999, which gives you the full date with the day of the week. Click OK. Highlight the changed date and time. Edit > Auto Text. Under the My Auto Text category, select Journal Entry. Clicking on the Auto Text button, select Change from the drop down menu. Click on Close and test your modified Journal Entry header (JE and press F3). I know it may not seem like much, but for me, it makes my journal entries quicker, so I can get straight to writing. I'm sure you can think of similar snippets to make your own work go quicker.
Paths, Categories, and Links There are some buttons and check-boxes in the Auto Text dialog I haven't mentioned yet. They are the Path and Categories buttons, the two “Save Links Relative To” check-boxes, and the “Display remainder of name as suggestion while typing” check-box. Let's take a quick look at these. If you click on the Path button, it brings up a dialog with a list of paths where LibreOffice stores the Auto Text files. You should see two paths by default. One is a system folder, where the defaults that you can't change are stored. The other is to a user path, where your personal data is stored. This is the path you want to back up in order to preserve the Auto Text entries you have created. You can Add a new path, like a path to a server on your network, by clicking on the Add button and browsing to the location. The default two are usually enough for most people unless you are in an enterprise or company setting where company Auto Text entries are stored on a server. When you are finished making changes, click on OK. Clicking on the Categories button brings up a list of the categories and their paths. You can't delete any of the default categories except for My Auto Text. The others are fixed. But you can create new categories. To create a new category, enter the name in the Category text box and select a non-system path from the Path drop-down list. Click the New button to add it to the list of categories. I created a new category named Journaling in this manner. The Rename button allows me to edit the name of any of the categories. Just select the category from the list and type the new name in the Category text box. Click the Rename button to change the name. Click the OK button when finished making changes to the categories. You can move entries from one category to another by clicking on the entry and dragging it into the other category. I moved my two journal entries into the new Journaling category.
The “Save Links Relative To” check-boxes control whether the paths to the Auto Text files are relative or absolute. One check-box is for the local file system and the other is for the Internet. For most people, leaving these unchecked is the way to go. In some bigger deployments, the IT staff might decide to check these. The reasons for checking these are beyond the scope of this article, but I wanted to make you aware of them. The last check-box is the “Display remainder of names as suggestion while typing” at the top of the dialog. This check-box works in conjunction with the Auto Complete settings. If checked, and the Auto Text shortcut has more that three letters, the name of the Auto Text entry will display in the same manner as other Auto Complete entries. You can use the Auto Complete accept key to insert the Auto Text into your document. A good example is Lorem Ipsum Auto Text. The shortcut is LOREM. With this, and Auto Complete turned on, when you type the R, it shows Lorem Ipsum as an Auto Complete. Pressing the accept key (Enter in my case) inserts the Lorem Ipsum text into your document. Auto Text is a feature that allows you to repeat information without having to enter it each time. Besides the number of entries already created, You can add new ones of your own. Those entries can contain fields as well as other text formatted the way you want. You can create your own categories for storing and organizing your Auto Text entries.