Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
This is part 60. The big six-zero. Five years worth of articles about my favorite office suite. Due to demands at work and ambitions to take my writing in other directions, this is also my last article in this series. It has been a privilege to write for you each month and teach you about the many things you can do in LibreOffice. Believe me when I say I have learned a great deal by writing for you. In the years writing about LibreOffice, I have collected a lot of helpful hints that were too short to constitute an article of their own. So, for this final hurrah, I bring you 10 quick tips for using LibreOffice.
1. Icon Sets You can customize LibreOffice in ways that work best for you. One of these customizations is the icon sets used for the toolbars. There are seven different icon sets in the latest version 5: Breeze, Galaxy, High Contrast, Oxygen, Sifr, Tango, and Human. Human is the default for Linux, and Tango is the default for Windows. Personally, I like Sifr. The flat black icons are easy for me to sort through. The colorful icons of the other sets are distracting for me. You can set the icon size and style at Tools > Options > LibreOffice > View.
2. Keyboard Shortcuts Keyboard shortcuts are a great time saver. Instead of taking your hands off the keyboard to grab the mouse and do something, your hands can just stay at the keyboard and get the same results. Like any office suite, LibreOffice has a full basket of shortcuts. You can get a list of shortcuts at Tools > Customize. Select the Keyboard tab. Scroll through the list to see what is available for LibreOffice in general, or for the program you are currently working in. It is worth your time get to know the shortcuts and start using them. Don't try to learn them all at once. Take a block of them and get familiar with them. Once you have that group down, start in on the next. In Tools > Customize, you can create your own shortcuts. The keys or key combinations in the list that are not grayed out are the ones that are available for changing. I would steer clear of those that already have assignments, and look for ones that don't. Select the category and function from the two lists below and click modify to assign that function to the key or key combination.
3. Mouse Zoom After preaching about keeping your hands off the mouse, my next tip is about zooming using the mouse. Most mice today have a scroll wheel, and you can use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out of your document. LibreOffice allows you to zoom from 20% (very small) to 600% (huge). Press the CTRL key while turning the scroll wheel to zoom in and out. Zoom in (make it bigger) by scrolling the wheel forward (away from you), and zoom out (make it smaller) by scrolling the wheel back (toward you). The amount of zoom is controlled by your mouse settings.
4. Crop An Image You can now crop an image directly in LibreOffice. No more opening GiMP or some other image program just to crop an image. To crop a selected image, Format > Image > Crop. Or you can click the icon on the Graphic toolbar. The image is surrounded by eight control handles. Crop the image horizontally or vertically by dragging the center handles in the side and top/bottom edges. Dragging the corner handles crops both. Dragging while holding the SHIFT key maintains the image’s original aspect-ratio. After cropping an image, you can resize it and still maintain your crop. Crop mode stops when you press ESC or click anywhere outside the image.
5. Quick Calculations in Writer Sometimes while writing a document, you need to insert the results of a calculation. You could go to your computer's calculator program, but that means getting out of Writer to start another program. Instead, use the Formula toolbar built into Writer. View > Toolbars > Formula or pressing the F2 key brings up the Formula toolbar. The bar works in the same manner as the formula bar in Calc, but you have a smaller set of functions you can use. Click on the fx button for a menu of the available functions. Once you finish, click the check button or press the Enter key. The result of the calculation will appear at the last position of your cursor.
6. Placeholders Placeholders are useful in templates and Auto Text. They are special fields that act as temporary text until the actual text or object is inserted. For example, if you were creating a template for a contract, you wouldn't know the names of the parties involved in the contact while you are creating the template. You can insert placeholder fields in the template – to be filled in later when the template is used to create a document. To create a placeholder, CTRL-F2 to open the Fields dialog. Click on the functions tab. Select placeholder from the Type list, and pick the placeholder type from the Format list. You can pick from Text, Table, Frame, Image, and Object. In the Placeholder text box, enter the text you want to stand-in for the placeholder. For example, with the Text format selected, you could enter “your name” to create a placeholder that reads <your name>. The Reference is a help tag that appears when you hover your mouse over the placeholder. Click Insert to enter the placeholder in your document. To replace a placeholder with the actual information for the document, click on the placeholder and start typing for a text placeholder. For the table, frame, and object placeholders, you get the appropriate dialog. For the image placeholder, you get a file dialog. The placeholder is replaced with text you type or object you set with the dialog.
7. Protecting Sections in Writer You can protect any section of a writer document from changes. Some sections, like table of contents, are protected by default. If you were creating a template for a legal document, and there were parts of the document that should never change, you can protect them from changes with a password. Select the text you need to protect, then Insert > Section. Give the section a name. Check the Protect and Password check boxes. A password dialog will pop up. Enter and confirm the password. Click OK. In the Section dialog, click Insert. To remove the protection and make changes, Format > Sections. Select the section you want to change. Uncheck the Protect check box, and enter the password when prompted. You can now make changes to the section.
8. Entire Row/Column Reference When creating a formula in Calc, you sometimes need to reference an entire row or column, usually because the column or row will grow and you have no way to know where it will end. Before version 5, you had to create a reference like A1:A1048576 for columns or A1:AMJ1 for rows. Now, you can use a short reference to the column or row. For columns, you can enter A:A to reference the entire A column. For rows you can enter 1:1 to reference the entire row 1. You can even reference a range of columns or rows (A:B, 1:2).
9. Auto Filters Top 10 Calc allows you to easily show the top 10 values in any column through the AutoFilter function. To activate the filter, Data > Filter > AutoFilter. Once active, the filter shows a down arrow in the first cell of each column. Clicking on the arrow opens a drop down menu. One of the options is Top 10. Select Top 10 and you will get the top 10 records based on the values in that column. You could use it to determine your highest sales day, or the day of the highest peak on a stock. This tip works only for columnar data. To clear the AutoFilter, select Data > Filter > AutoFilter again.
10. Scientific Format and Engineer Notation Scientific notation is used to express very large or very small numbers. The basic idea is to take a predetermined number of digits and multiply them by powers of 10. This allows scientists and engineers to express these large numbers without having to write out all the digits. Engineer notation is a subset of scientific notation where the powers of 10 are a multiple of 3. Calc will allow you to express both of these. Let's take the rather large number 12455485785256. A rather large number to type over and over again. In Calc, we can convert this number to scientific notation. Format > Cells. On the Numbers tab select Scientific from the Category list box. Click OK. Our number is transformed into Calc's version of scientific notation, 1.25E+13. 1.25 is the significant digits, E is the place holder for 10, and +13 represents the exponent of 10. If we want engineer notation, Format > Cells. Again, with Scientific selected, check the “Engineering notation” check box. Our number in engineering notation becomes 12.46E+12. Note that the exponent is now a multiple of 3.
One Last Thing I'd like to share one last thing with you that has been a big help to me while writing 60 articles about LibreOffice – documentation. I have a few helpful links to share with you. Each one provides something different. The LibreOffice Community Support Page: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/ The Community Support Page has links to documentation, online help, Ask LibreOffice, IRC, the wiki, and mailing list. You will want to check the document page often to see what manuals have been updated. LibreOffice Documentation / Publication Page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications If you can't wait for the official release of a manual, this is the page where you find the documentation team’s drafts. Keep in mind that many of these documents are drafts and may contain mistakes and errors. When I was writing about Base, this was one of the only places to find documentation at the time. Of course, now there is an official Base manual. Just my luck.
Document Foundation Blog: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/ The Document Foundation blog is a great place to get news about new releases, tips, events, and more. They don't overwhelm you with posts, but they do keep you up to date. With that, we come to the conclusion of my series on LibreOffice. It has been a great joy, and I wish many more successful years of publication for Full Circle. I will continue as a reader, and you may still see an article from me now and then, just not every month. I leave you with one final thought, “Don't work so hard that you don't take time to live, and don't live so hard that you can't enjoy work.”