hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1149.txt

Episode: 1149
Title: HPR1149: LibreOffice 02 Writer Default Template
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1149/hpr1149.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 19:47:28

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Hello, this is Ahuka, and welcome to another exciting episode of Backer Public Radio.
This is part two of my series on Libra Office, so if you did not hear part one, you might
want to go back and give a listen to that, but what I want to do this time is I want
to talk about templates for Libra Office writer.
Now, from last time, I said that templates were one of the key concepts in using any word
processing program intelligently, and I made the claim that all word processors work pretty
much the same, though the things that I talk about are going to be broadly applicable,
but I'm going to focus this on Libra Office because I'm a supporter of free software,
you know?
I think Libra Office is really one of the nicest things out there, and is, in fact, a lot
more capable than most people realize.
You know, I think people have this idea somehow that Microsoft Office is the gold standard
and everything else is, you know, aab, not up to snuff.
In fact, I would argue that Libra Office writer is superior to Microsoft word in many respects,
but our purpose is, I think, this will be fairly straightforward.
Now, what we're looking at here is that every time you create a document, what you are
really doing is making a copy of a template.
That is always your starting point in any word processing program.
Now, there could be any variety of pre-made templates, and this is one of those areas
where I will say Microsoft Office does a much better job than Libra Office, and that
is in giving you a lot of pre-made templates for all sorts of things.
Now, I'm not going to go into all the details of how to do, you know, access those other
than I'll just mention if you are in Microsoft Word, go to the File menu and select New.
You'll get a lot more options than if you just press Control-N.
So, if you're a Microsoft Word user, you know, that's your clue, your hint to get started.
But what happens if you just start a new document without consciously selecting a template?
When you do that, what you're really doing is you're saying, I want to use the default
template.
All of these programs have default templates, but as the name implies, if you haven't consciously
selected any other template, this is the one we're going to use.
Now, with Microsoft Word, that is a file that lives on your hard drive.
In earlier versions of Microsoft Word, it was a file with an extension DOT.
All DOT files were templates, but with Office, I believe was 2007, that they changed to having
a default format using OpenOffice XML, though all of the Office files, game XML files at
that point.
And they changed the suffix to DOTX, the X, standing for XML.
And the default template for Microsoft Word then is called Normal, N-O-R-M-A-L, Normal.D-O-T,
or more recently, Normal.D-O-T-X.
And if you opened that file, you could make changes to it, and I mentioned last time that
that was one of the things that I learned to do fairly early on, to change the template
to suit my particular needs and workload.
So I started looking at OpenOffice and now LibraOffice, and as I said before, I always
start from the standpoint that I know what I want to do, and these programs will have
some way of doing it.
I just have to figure it out.
So I started looking around.
Where is the normal template for OpenOffice?
Where's the default template?
And what I found is that with OpenOffice and LibraOffice, things are a little bit different
from the way they are with Microsoft Word.
Not a big deal, you just need to understand.
There is still a template, but it's not exposed to you in a way that you can edit it.
They take a slightly different approach.
There is a built-in template at the heart of the program, and somewhere in the code, you
could probably find it, but that's not the way you do things with LibraOffice.
Instead, with LibraOffice, what you do is you create your default template.
So that's just a slightly different thing.
So how would you do that?
Well, it's not terribly hard.
What you do is you open up a document, link document of some kind, and then you start
making changes to it that reflect what you want your alt template to be.
So I mentioned last time I have certain workflow that for me works out very nicely so that
every time I start a new document, I start with heading one.
The heading one is the title of the document.
One of the things that results from this is that all of my documents tend to look a lot
alike.
It doesn't bother me in the least.
It's what's called a style, all right?
And if you worked in the magazine industry or publishing or whatever, you know that publications
have style sheets that say this is how we do things here.
So the fact that my template is set up to do certain things is really an expression
of a style that works for me.
And I mentioned that because if you have a different kind of workflow or a different kind
of style that it's you, that's fine.
You know, do what suits you.
Don't slavishly follow what I'm doing.
What I'm trying to do really is just teach you the technique.
So to do my kind of document, I would open a document and the very first thing I would
do is I would go to the upper left corner and I would take a look at the drop down for
selecting styles and I would select heading number one.
And you know, what that would mean is that from then on, when I save this as a template,
every document I open, every document I start working on, I will automatically start with
heading number one.
I could make other changes.
I could adjust margins to, if I didn't like the default, you know, I could put in default
footers.
Okay.
One of the things that I like to do and I do this at my office, for instance, is that
all of the documents that I create at my office reside on a network drive somewhere.
And so trying to figure out where is this document.
I put a footer on all of my documents that has half of the document.
So if you had a printed copy and you wanted to know where is this on the network, you just
look at the bottom of the page and it's going to tell you right there.
You know, this is on such and such a network drive, such and such a directory.
Here's the name of the file, you can go look it up.
And I just do that once in the template and then every document I create is going to
have that.
You see what I'm talking about here?
The power of templates.
It's a great way to make your life easier.
So you've opened up this document you've made, whatever changes now.
In subsequent discussions, you know, I'll get into some of the changes you might want
to make.
But this is the prerequisite to all of the other things that I want to talk about.
So I need to get this out of the way first.
So how do you turn this into a template?
Well if you go to the file menu in Libra Office and you take a look at what pops up in
the file menu, you're going to see a section there called attempts, right?
You can select templates and then that's going to pop up a little thing and you can say,
okay, I want to save my template.
And when you save it, you need to give it a name.
Now I'm assuming I'm creating a default template.
So I give it with my name underscore default.
So I know it's my default template, the name I give it.
And then there is a category selector.
I put it in my templates because I created it and click, okay, now we're not quite done
yet.
What we've done is we've created template.
We've saved it on our hard drive.
And that's a good thing.
Where is it on the hard drive?
Well, you know, that may depend, okay?
One of the things that I love about Libra Office is its cross platform.
I can use Libra Office on a Windows computer and I have on a Linux computer what I do most
of the time.
And it's available for Mac OS and just about anything else.
So you know, where that actually is going to reside on your hard drive, you'd have to
take a look and see.
I'll just, I'll say that on the Linux computer that I created this on, it says slash home slash
Kevin slash dot config slash Libra Office slash three slash user slash template, all right?
And if anything, the path is even weirder in Windows, I know hard to believe, isn't it?
So you know, don't worry about where it's located on your hard drive, except for one thing,
you can transfer your template from one computer or another and I'll come back.
So now that we've created and saved the template, we still need to tell Libra Office, this
is the default template I want you to use.
So again, we go to file templates and then select organize and it's going to pop up a very
similar window to what we saw before, double click on the My Templates folder and you
should see your template show up, right?
Like for some reason, you don't, then something went wrong in one of the previous steps, maybe
you neglected one of the steps or something and you need to go back and review that.
But assuming you do see it, and you know, that part went right.
So with the organized window open, you select your template and you go to the commands
drop down and select set as default templates, the window, you should have a new default
template.
You can test this very simply by doing a control and and whatever new document comes up
should have your changes in it.
So in my case, if I did a control and I would get a document that has heading one already
selected as the first element on the page.
Now there's a lot more you can do with the default template and we're going to get into
quite a few of those things.
Anytime you want to go back and add something or change something, whatever, you go to file,
templates, select edit and then select your template and it'll open up and make another
change.
For instance, maybe I want to change the font for heading one, all right?
I like the liberation fonts.
So I'm going to say I want heading one to be liberation sands.
So I just open up my template edit mode and I go to the heading one and select liberation
sands and then save it and now the next time I open up this document, it'll be heading
one with the liberation sands and so on.
And again, you can test this by just opening a new document, pressing control and and
see how that one works.
Now I mentioned that one of the things that is really great about Libra offices that
it's cross platform and you can create a default template in Linux, copy that default
template onto a Windows machine that has Libra off all and it worked just fine.
No problem at all.
Now what you would have to do is you would have to figure out where to put it on your system
and so I'm going to assume most people listening to this podcast on Hacker Public Radio are
smart enough to figure what directory a file is going in.
So I'm just going to say I have a Windows 7 machine and I know that with Windows, if it
was XP, it was slightly different from Windows 7 and things like that.
So I first went to my Linux machine and as I said that was slash home slash Kevin slash
dot config slash Libra off a slash three slash user slash template.
And I found a file that knew as you know my name underscore default.
I took that I put it in Dropbox.
I have Dropbox on all of my computers.
So then I go to my Windows 7 machine and the place to put it on my Windows 7 machine
was C colon backslash users backslash 7 backslash app data backslash roaming backslash
Libra office backslash three backslash user backslash template backslash.
I told you the Windows one was even weirder than the Linux one though I was right.
Now if I just copy that over, it's in the right place.
Now what all I need to do is to repeat the process of saying make this fault template.
So I've copied the file over.
All I need to do is I go to in on my Windows machine now go to file, templates, select
the default template, click the commands drop down and say set this as the default.
Now even if you only had one machine, put it in Dropbox anyway.
As we go through this, ideally you're going to discover that you can make a whole lot
of customizations here and you don't want to have to redo it if something happens.
Just make sense.
Your default template should be like any other piece of data that you want to keep no
matter what happens.
So I would say put it in a Dropbox or back it up whatever your ideal backup method is.
For me, having it on Dropbox and having it distributed a bunch of different machines
and including on a couple of USB thumb drives pretty much does the trick.
So that's the process of creating a default template in LibreOffice and what I'm going
to do next is I'm going to start opening up the idea of styles and the thing that we want
to understand here is that styles live within templates.
So it would be useless for me to explain styles to you unless you already knew how to create
a default template to save them in.
So that's why we do it here.
So we may jump back and forth between templates and styles a little bit.
That I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
So this is a hookah signing off on the second of our series on LibreOffice and just remind
everyone to support free software.
Thank you.
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