Open Office Styles

Regarding Open Office and learning how to use it: if you already know how to use the basic functions of word processing in Open Office, there is one feature you should invest two or three hours learning, and learning well. That feature is Styles. There are character styles, paragraph styles, frame styles, page styles, and list styles. A style is like a pre-defined template which guides how your words go on the page, and sets things like tabs, line spacing, indents, italics, etc. If you don't know how to use styles you'll find yourself fighting against your computer rather than working with it--very frustrating. Sometimes with a few keystrokes you wind up inadvertantly changing the look of your entire document.

This explains why I have no hair. I did not know how to use styles and I was bumping into the power of the word processor without knowing what I was doing. Sort of like sticking your tongue in a light socket.

 Both Open Office and Word have styles. Once you learn how to use them properly, they are extremely powerful and very helpful. But until you learn to use them, it would be best to keep hammers, guns, and bricks in a separate room from your computer.

Invest the time. Read the helps. Play with a test document. Learn to use the styles. Especially learn what the "autoupdate" feature does. I can now change my plain-vanilla text manuscript into a highly formatted print-on-demand book in a couple of frustration-free hours, because of styles. Learn to use 'em - they're your friend.

Microsoft Office versus OpenOffice

Just had an outstanding illustration of why I abandoned MS Office a long time ago, and have never looked back and never regretted it. Spent five minutes just trying to figure out how to reveal hidden characters. Back when MS Office was a decent product, it was easy to find. But when MS began changing the user interface with each major release (sometimes radically changing it), the learning curve became simply ridiculous--and that was just to relearn stuff you already knew how to do.

Anyway, I have written countless sermons, four novels, and one non-fiction using OpenOffice. I have installed numerous major upgrades over the years, and not one time did I have to relearn the user interface--not once.

I was a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, and an IT director at a graduate school, so I'm not exactly a newbie. But when MS started yanking around their customer base, I jumped ship. Have never regretted it.

OpenOffice is free, it's reliable, it's well-maintained, and it's user interface is stable. Once you invest the time to learn it (it's much like Word used to be), you will never have to make that investment again.

Okay, just needed to rant a little. I'm done. You can go back to searching your ribbon for stuff you used to know exactly where to find (while I return to my productivity).

Wahoo!

Finished fixing the Falcon Down manuscript! Yesterday's investment in reading the Style and Template portions of the Open Office Writer Guide was time well-spent. I have fully finished reformatting the manuscript with proper styles and fixed all the problems with italics. Now I'm moving on with the story itself (it's over 50% complete at this point).

If you're wondering what all this is about, you may read the first three chapters of Falcon Down right here. I'm anticipating that the book will be available around the first of May. Here's the preliminary version of the back-cover blurb:

Flying low, slow and blind over a moonlit Bering Sea, Major Jacob Kelly put his sleek F-16 fighter through its paces on a Project Hydra test flight. He didn’t know that an air-to-air missile from a Soviet fighter covertly trailing him was about to start a sequence of events that would place him into a desperate fight for survival. Incarcerated in a secret facility deep within the Soviet Union, Kelly discovers the most daring and ruthless program of international espionage in the history of the Cold War. He faces torture, interrogation, and certain death—unless he can escape . . .
 
Falcon Down is the first in a series of four novels from author C. H. Cobb that bring the two superpowers to the precipice of war in the turbulent final decade of the Soviet Union.

Hunkering down over our laptops

Doris and I have spent the day each banging away on our laptops, and tomorrow will be more of the same, as we enjoy this New Year's holiday.

She's working on her PensofTwins website. I'm working on learning how to properly use Open Office (OO) styles so I don't keep trashing my novel as I'm writing it.

Such a sob story. OO trashed my book. Well, let me rephrase that. I did some boneheaded something or other that wound up clobbering the formatting in my new novel, Falcon Down. It was a product of my own ignorance (the boo-boo, not the book). Major league pain-in-the-neck.

So I've spent the day reading the manual for OO, determined to work with the product rather than fighting against it, and I'm setting up styles to format the book properly as I write. This is going to wind up being a valuable use of time, and a good experience, but I am champing at the bit to do more WRITING, not clutzing around with my word-processor. I hope to get back to actually writing more on the story some time tomorrow.

Doris has spent the day working on her website, learning arcane trivia about beginner's level HTML, style-sheets and what-not. She would rather be DRAWING and doing art and photo work. But it's a good experience for her, too, and she is slowly building her website. I love their logo, by the way. Diane designed it. Take a look.

Anyway, I suppose we make quite a pair. Believe me, the nuts don't fall far from the tree, either. When we had the kids here for Christmas it looked like a Dell sales event, with laptops everywhere. What a bunch of geeks.

 But it's been a good day, today, and what we've been working on had to get done, and the holiday has given us a break from the church ministry.

The fruit of Doris' labor can be seen at PensOfTwins.com, and her cards and my book Outlander Chronicles: Phoenix can be purchased from DoorwayPress.com.