LibreOffice Writer
A Personalized Approach to Learning
The most-used application in any office suite is the word processor, and for LibreOffice it is no different. Writer is used more than any other application in it.
Page Contents
The word processor for LibreOffice,allows users to do everything from compose simple letters to designing brochures and complex books and other documents.
Writer's user interface are menus, toolbars, a sidebar, and contextual right-click menus. In addition to this, there are several different user interfaces, referred to as the notebookbar.
About Writer
The word processor for LibreOffice,allows users to do everything from compose simple letters to designing brochures and complex books and other documents. By default it saves documents into the OpenDocument Text (odt). However, it also can open, save, and edit Microsoft Word documents.
The open-source word processor handles documents created by Word very well. It also has most of the features that the popular text has and some that it does not.
User interface
Writer's user interface are menus, toolbars, a sidebar, and contextual right-click menus. In addition to this, there are several different user interfaces, referred to as the notebookbar.
Writer has more than 100 fonts. While there are different fonts in different operating system, different instances of Writer have a set of common fonts, regardless of the operating system it is installed on. This makes it easier to share documents with other LibreOffice users. Someone using Writer on Windows 10 could easily open a document by someone who created it on Ubuntu, and it would look exactly the same.
Menus
It has 10 menus that contains all its features and settings. (11 if it is on Mac).
LibreOffice (Mac only)
File
Edit
View
Insert
Format
Styles
Table
Form
Tools
Window
Help
This is a list of the menus in LibreOffice Writer. Click the desired one to learn more about it. Most of the menus are unique to Writer. The File menu in Writer, however, most of the same items as the other applications in the suite.
In addition to the above menus there is also one for Help. Help is the same in all six applications. In the Mac version of LibreOffice, there is a LibreOffice menu that contains some of the items in the Help menu in other instances of LibreOffice and an item from the Tools menu.
Several of the items in the menus launch dialogs. Dialogs typically have numerous settings for a particular feature or function. These are usually divided into several tabs. An example of this is the Paragraph dialog. It has 10 tabs that allow users to indent, align, and change selected paragraphs in other ways.
Toolbars
There are also 30 toolbars that contain many of the functions and settings that can be found in the menus. These are often quicker to access than the menu items.
The toolbars are available through the Toolbars sub-menu of the View menu. Most of the toolbars are in the other applications, but there are a few of them are exclusive to Writer. Simply click the desired one in the Toolbars sub-menu.
Toolbars also appear when you click in a desired object or paragraph style. For example, when a table is clicked, the Table toolbar appears. If you click a list, the Bullets and Numbering toolbar will appear.
Sidebar
By default the sidebar appears on the right side of the the Writer document window. It can be set to not appear, however.
The sidebar is like the toolbars. It contains quick access to items that are contained in the menus and dialogs.
There are seven sections in the sidebar. They are
Properties
This section contains several smaller sections that with settings to adjust characters and paragraphs. These include selecting fonts, alignment, and indentation. It also gives users access to corresponding dialogs that can be found in the menus.
Page
The four sub-sections in this section are Format, Styles, Header, and Footer. These have settings for the page orientation, margins, size of the the page, and the number of columns. Like in the Properties section, there are links to associated dialogs.
Styles
This is a list of all the styles available for Writer. The styles are in six categories:
Paragraph Styles
Character Styles
Frame Styles
Page Styles
List Styles
Table Styles
This is the only place to access all the styles. The section has features that allow users to add and create styles.
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Gallery
This contains vector art that LibreOffice comes preinstalled with. The artwork is categorized into different themes. More themes and images can be added to the gallery.
Navigator
This allows users to jump to different elements in a document, such as tables and images. Simply click the element in the list to go to it.
Writer vs Word
LibreOffice Writer is one of the most feature rich word processors on the market. It has features that the Windows version of Microsoft Word does not have. (The opposite also is true. Word has features that Writer does not.). Here is a Web page from the The Document Foundation, comparing Microsoft Office and LibreOffice.
An example of this is that Writer is that it gives users more control out-of-the box when converting documents to PDF than Microsoft Word. Word can convert documents to PDF, but it does not give users that many settings for the conversion. LibreOffice Writer gives users a PDF Options dialog with six tabs of settings.
Most people around the world use Microsoft Word on Windows because it has more features and capabilities than any other version of Word, but it ties individuals and companies to Windows. Mac users don't have the same options as their Windows counterparts. LibreOffice users can use any operating system they want. They can even put the suite on a USB stick and taking it from computer to computer.
It also doesn't require the user to login to a Microsoft account, and it won't be required to log in to it every 30 days to keep the product active. With LibreOffice, there is no need to log into an account.
The major advantage Writer has over Word and many other popular word processors, such as Google Docs, is the combination of flexibility and anonymity.