Episode: 1375
Title: HPR1375: LibreOffice 15 Writer Nested Lists Introduced
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1375/hpr1375.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 00:25:38

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Hello, this is Ahuka. Welcome to another exciting episode of Hack Republic Radio and our ongoing
series on Libra Office, focusing for now on Libra Office Writer. Now, one of the things
that I probably should have mentioned before, I'll mention it now. This stuff can be a little
bit difficult. I'm not sure audio is necessarily the best medium for doing office
software tutorials, but it's what Hack Republic Radio is. The way that I do these is I first
write out everything. I put it up on my website, along with screenshots, and that's how I organize
what I'm doing, because when I start going through recording the program for Hack Republic Radio,
you know, I'm not winging it. I hope that's clear that I'm working from a script. So if you go to my
site at www.ahuka.com, you'll see Libra Office tutorials and for every one of the programs that I've
recorded in this series, you will see that there is a corresponding page on my website, and it's
got the screenshots and it's got examples and things like that that, you know, if you're having a
little bit of trouble following what we're talking about as we go through this, you might want to
check that out. I'm not quite as advanced at this point as Dan Waschko, because he actually has videos
as well, and one of these days I may figure out how to do the video part, but right now I'm more
interested in just trying to get this material out there. So it is what it is, but now that you know
where you can find that, what we want to look at this time is we're going to take what we did before
about lists, numbered lists, or bullet lists, and we took each of those apart, we saw the components
that make them tick. Now what we want to do is we want to talk about nested lists. This is where it
starts to get really interesting, okay? Nested lists are lists that have various levels. So in other words,
if the first level is the main list, then each item in that main list could have a sublist under it.
Maybe some of those things have sublists under them and so on. You can have up to 10 levels
in Libra Office Writer. We mentioned that last time we were talking about numbered lists in
particular how all of that works. So with 10 levels, this can get very frustrated. I think there's
probably nothing that frustrates people more than nested lists because they don't understand how
to work with them. Scientists, computer scientists have not yet been able to devise the telepathy
interface. Now the telepathy interface would be the one where you just think what you want and
the computer would understand and do it. Sadly, we don't have that. So what we're stuck with are
computers that do what they're told to do and we have to figure out the language. We have to figure
out how to tell it what we want. That's not quite as easy on us, but this is what we need to do.
So if you're going to use nested lists properly, you're going to have to learn this, but if you do
that you contain many, perhaps not all, but at least many of the problems you face. So nested list,
each list item can hold a list of its own. Each sublist item can hold another list of its own,
et cetera. So up to 10 levels. Now if I saw a list that had 10 nested levels, I would think this
is a disaster. I'm really having trouble thinking about what that means. But two, three, four levels,
that's not too uncommon. And particularly when you do technical writing, that's where you start
needing to get into items where you're doing sections leveling and things like that. That's more
for outlines. And as I said before, outlines is another topic in and of itself.
But let's take a look at the nested lists and let's assume we're working two, three, four levels
something like that. The key to this is something called the bullets and numbering bar,
which you may or may not have ever paid any attention to. But if you're going to work with nested
lists, you absolutely have to pay attention to this. There's a couple of ways you can do this.
You can go to view toolbars, the view menu, select within the view menu toolbars and then put a
checkmark next to bullets and numbering. And if you do, you're going to get a bar that has a series
of icons that you can click on. Now this can be in different places depending on your machine.
I have a Linux box and a Windows box available to me. So my Linux box has LibreOffice 3.6.2
and in that my bullets and numbering bar is docked at the bottom of the screen.
On Windows, I have 3.5, it is a floating window. Wherever you find it, you will need to get
familiar with it. Now the other thing is if you simply put your insertion mark within a list item,
that will automatically make this toolbar appear. So LibreOffice is smart enough to say,
oh, you're in a list, you must want to do something with it. And then once you leave the list,
it will go away. So what are these? The first button is a toggle that turns button lists
on and off. In that respect, there's no different from the button that you have up at the top that
does that. The second toggle is numbered lists on or off. Again, it's just like the thing you get
at the top. The third one turns off numbering and closes the toolbar. You don't need any of these
buttons. Not those first three. I have no idea why they're there. There may be some philosophy
in the people who built this that says that was a good way to do things. I don't use any of those
first three. And one of the reasons is I don't use buttons to turn numbering or bullets on or off.
And that's the whole thing we've been talking about in this series. Use styles. You use styles to do
this. And so if I'm doing with styles, I don't need to turn numbering on. I'm using a numbered
style or I'm using a bullet style. So how I would do it is I would put my insertion mark where I
want to begin a list. Then click on the list styles tab in the styles and formatting window.
And then double click a style and it will be applied. So the real significance of this are the
other buttons. And the other buttons are ones that are going to solve so many of your problems.
Okay. So the next two buttons, there's one is an arrow pointing to the left. The second one
is an arrow pointing to the right. The arrow pointing to the left is promote one level and the
arrow pointing to the right is demote one level. Now these look an awful lot like buttons that you
have up top on the formatting bar that are used to indent to decrease the indent or increase the
indent. They look that like that but they're not the same thing at all. Okay. There is a distinction
between appearance and function. And that's how we started our whole Libra Office
discussion was to talk about why it's important to have a distinction between appearance and function.
Now if you click the indent, all right, decrease indent, increase indent, you'll move your items
back and forth but you won't change what they are. If this was a level one item in a list
and you click the right arrow, it doesn't become a level two item. It becomes a level one item that
got moved over. And that's not at all the same thing. And it becomes really apparent when you're
trying to say, well, wait a minute. Why? Why didn't that change numbering when I did that? Well,
it's not going to change the numbering if all you're doing is changing the indent. Changing the
indent is purely appearance. What you need to do is promote or demote and that will affect the
appearance to some degree because it will move it. But it will also change the numbering scheme.
So let's say if we're going to demote one level, it's going to say, okay, this is no longer a level
one. This is now a level two. And my numbering scheme is going to change blah, blah, blah. All right.
So it's really important to use the promote and demote and not the indent.
Now, the next two buttons are interested. They do even more. By the nature of nested lists,
any list item can contain a nested list within it. Libra Office Writer refers to these as sub points.
So you can move any list item along with its sub points using these buttons. And they will all
change levels together. So if you have a level two list item with three level three items below it,
clicking the promote one level with sub points just once. You just click that button once.
It will turn your level two item into a level one. And it will turn all three of those level three
items into three level two items. And it will promote all of them by one level. And of course,
demote one level with sub points would be just the opposite. So you could take your level two item
and make it a level three. The level three items under it now become level four items.
And all of that changes then.
Now, the next button says insert a numbered entry. This is useful as well.
When you do this, the insertion mark moves down the page by exactly the same distance as if you
would hit the enter key. But the difference is when you hit the enter key, what you're doing,
we talked about this in an earlier tutorial. Every time you hit the enter key, you are saying to
the computer, I am done with this item. Move me to the next item. Now, if you're on a list,
what that means is I'm done with this list item. Move me to the next list item. And you get a new,
you know, increment the number by one and start the next item. But sometimes you just want an
additional paragraph or an additional a numbered line or something like that. And that's what this
insert a numbered entry will do. So it'll move just as far down the page. But you haven't told
the computer, I'm done, set me up for the next item. You're just simply saying, now I just want to
drop down the line and keep going. So if you have to add that second paragraph without changing
the list number, then that's the way you do it. You just insert an unnumbered entry.
Then sometimes you want to move items up and down. Okay. Remember, we talked about how order
is really important. Suppose you're looking at a numbered list and you say, you know, item two
really should be item one. I had them in the wrong order. Now, the way lists are created if you're
using these styles or really in any word processing program, it's going to work this way.
Is that the numbering is put in actually by the program. You're not actually typing one dot.
And then so, or if you start that way, usually the word processing program say, oh, you're starting
a numbered list and it'll take over on there. But when you want to move things around, you want to
change the numbering as well. And you can do that here from the bar by using and these are the
up and down pointing arrows. So they don't promote or demote, but they change your position in the list.
So all we have to do then is take a put our insertion mark in a list item. If we click the
up arrow, it'll go up one. Every time we click the arrow, it'll go up one. And at the same time,
it'll switch the numbers. So if I have something that is number three on my list and I move it up
one using this button, it'll become number two and what used to be number two now becomes number three.
Then we have the move up or move down with sub points. And we talked about sub points just a few
minutes ago with respect to promote and demote. Same kind of thing here. So let's say that I have a
item number three on my main, my level one list also has two level two items under it.
And then I'd say now that item number three really should have been item number two on that main
list. I'll move it up one. If I use the move up with sub points, then those sub points move up
with it. So it keeps all of them together. So they won't be renumbered. There's no reason to
renumber them. Those were sub points. So they were probably numbered one two or a, b or whatever.
If you wanted to change those, you'd have to go into one of those items and move it up or down.
But that won't happen here if they're just along the sub points for the ride.
Then there is a button called restart numbering. Very important button restart numbering.
This is one of those things that people get frustrated by this. And that's because the program
is trying to keep track of things in its own mind. And it sometimes doesn't do what we want
it to do because that telepathy interface thing we talked about just doesn't exist yet.
So let's say you have a three item sub list.
Three level two items under a level one. So we've got one dot blah blah blah. Two dot blah blah blah.
And then under that we've got a dot something b dot something c dot something. And then we jump back
to three dot blah blah on our main list. And then you say, well, okay, I need to do something
under that as well. And so you create a list item. You demote it using the demote button to make
sure that it's now a level two. And you think it's going to start at a again. And it doesn't.
It starts at D because it's looking up and it's saying, well, okay, on level two, we've already
used A, B, and C. So the next one is D. And you're going, it's not what I meant. Well,
all you have to do at this point is click the restart numbering. And then it will say,
oh, okay, I'll go back to A then. Well, you know, so A or one or I, you know, depending on
what kind of numbering style you're, you've got in there. So it'll just tell it to restart with
new numbers. Now, the last button on this bar brings up the bulletin numbering properties windows.
And that looks exactly like all of the ones that we looked at previously for bulletin numbered lists
where we deconstructed them. So it's the same kind of properties window. So how we've seen how we
can work with nested lists using the bullets in numbering bar. And we've talked about the
significance of promote and demote and the difference between the function and the functional
definition of an element and the way it appears on the page and how to move things up and down
and restart numbering. And I think if you've ever worked with nested lists and been frustrated,
this is going to solve a lot of these problems for you. So this is Ahuka. And as always, I'm
going to sign off by telling everyone, please support free software. Thank you and goodbye.
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