Episode: 1136
Title: HPR1136: LibreOffice 01 Introduction to Office software
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1136/hpr1136.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 19:39:18

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Hi, this is Ahuka. Welcome to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio. In this occasion,
I want to start what will probably be a fairly long series of recordings in which I'm going to talk
about different aspects of Libra Office and I'm going to kick that off today. I hope to have at least
a few things to say about all of the different components of Libra Office. In some cases, I might
have more than a few things to say, but I think it's going to be fun and one of the reasons that I
really want to do this is I've discovered this is one of those packages that everyone talks about,
most people use, and yet when I talk to them fairly carefully or show them things, it usually turns
out that they had no idea. So for instance, I had very recently done a presentation on Libra Office
for a local Linux users group, Metropolitan Detroit, and there were people there, friends of mine,
who are Linux experts, to some degree, had been active in the Linux users group for a long time,
very knowledgeable, use Linux and things like that in their jobs, and I'd show them things as like,
I never knew that. And boy, that's going to save me a lot of trouble now that I know how that works.
So I think it's one of those areas that people just aren't as knowledgeable about, and maybe I can
help with that. I happen to be an office software geek in that sense, and there had to be one somewhere
now, you know, you found one here. I know I'm not the only one. I've talked to some others,
in fact, recently, I had a chance to go to dinner with a fellow in Ohio named Andy Pataniak,
who is also an office software geek, and we just got together to talk about things, and it was
very enjoyable. So I want to see what I can do to help people to understand how all of this stuff
works. And it does work very, very nicely, but you need to know some things about it.
The first thing I want to say is that if you think about this in terms of learning a particular
program, you are already off on the wrong track. That's not a good thing to do. In fact,
I sometimes will talk to people who are in schools, and they will say something like,
yes, we are teaching our students Microsoft Office, and they're going to be very proud of themselves
for doing that, you know, because that's a very forward thinking thing to do, and you know,
they're going to go with Microsoft Office because that's what's used in the workplace and everything
else. And the problem with that is that you are then completely helpless if you're put in front
of any other program. And the thing that I think a lot of people don't realize is they all work
pretty much the same. There's not a huge difference between Libra Office, and Open Office,
and Microsoft Office, and Corel Word Perfect Office, and for that matter, in any other office
suite you want to mention, they all do pretty much the same thing, and they tend to do it in pretty
much the same way. And if you understand that, and if you start to learn the proper way to think
about these things, and you start to understand the concepts underlying what they do, then you are
in very good shape. Because if you know those things, you can be in front of any program at all,
and it really doesn't matter, because you'll know what it is that you need to do,
and then the problem that you'll run into, which is comparatively a rather minor one,
is to say, okay, for this particular program, where did they put this?
So you're going to find that things are sometimes in a different place, or they have a different name,
or whatever, but if you know what it is you're looking for, that's half the battle.
You know, I had someone talk to me about, oh, you know, we introduced Libra Office, and the feedback
we got was, you know, we couldn't do text boxes, and I thought, that's rather odd, that's a pretty
standard kind of thing. But it turns out, probably the biggest part of it is that in Libra Office,
they don't call them text boxes in the word processing program, which is writer. They call them
frames. That's simply a terminology thing. In fact, the Libra Office frames are more powerful
than the text boxes you see in most other programs. So in fact, rather than it being a weakness
of Libra Office, it really should be a strength if you know that. And if you don't know that,
then you have a problem. So when someone tells me, oh, I can't find this or that feature,
I start to say, well, you know, wait a minute, tell me how you looked. Did you look at the documentation?
You know, there's a lot of ways that you can get up to date on this stuff.
So that's what we want to do. We're going to, we're going to kick this thing off here.
And so the first thing we're going to say is, all the things I'm going to talk to you about,
or at least as far as I can tell at this point, maybe we'll find something that is unique.
But I'm going to say that basically everything we talk about will be just as applicable
if you use Open Office. It'll be just as applicable if you use Microsoft Office. It'll be just
as applicable if you use Corel Word Perfect Office. All right. So we're going to talk about the
basic concepts that are involved and not get into the minutia of, you know, which buttons I,
I will start giving you some guidelines about those things as well. But one of the things that
I have said and I still think this is true is that if you look at all of the software programs
that people run, the most used program is, or one of the most used programs certainly is word
processing. That's right. I mean, I suppose email in the web browser might be more often used.
But word processing is right up there. It's one of those apps virtually everyone uses.
And I would also say the number one most misused application is word processing.
Because not one person in a hundred has learned how to think about this properly.
So I see this when I have someone sitting down at a computer and you know, you open up your,
your word processing program, whatever it is. Because remember what I'm saying is the stuff
applies to all of them. And you get basically a blank looks like a sheet of paper on your screen.
And you're going to start, okay, what font do I want to use? Do I want to make it bold? Do I
want to change the size? And you start clicking buttons all over the place. And when I see that,
what that tells me is, you have no idea what you're doing, don't you? Because that's not the way to
use a word processing program. There may be rare instances where that's as good as anything you can do.
But a lot of times that's not the best way to think about things. You know, we sometimes have blinders
that at one point we had typewriters and then word processing came along and it's like, oh,
this is just a slightly better version of a typewriter because I can make corrections without
using white out. No, word processing should imply something more than that.
And because we have blinders, we sometimes forget what the software is actually capable of doing.
I have a great example of just this blindness that hits people. Years ago, I was teaching a class
in applied statistics. And this was in the computer lab because I always would teach that class
very hands-on that you were at the computer doing your calculations and everything,
doing all of your work at the computer. And so at one point, there was a statistical test
that had to be applied. And I gave everyone the formula. This is the statistical test you're supposed
to use. And you know, one of my students pulls a calculator out of his backpack.
And I said, ah, interesting. So what are you doing? He said, well, I'm taking out the calculator
professor because you want me to calculate this, right? And I said, yeah, I do. And I said,
let me just ask you a question. What's that thing in front of you? He said, it's a computer.
I said, what does the word computer mean? Eventually, the light bulb went off and he realized, oh,
yeah, this is a machine that by its very nature is capable of doing any calculation I want and
probably faster and easier than pulling a calculator out of the backpack. But he just hadn't
occurred to him to think about it that way. Now, in terms of word processing,
let's do a little thought experiment about all of this, shall we? Let's think about what happens
when we're using a word processor. All right? So we open up our word processor
and what are we going to do? Well, let's say, for instance, you're typing a letter.
All right? It's a very common sort of thing to do. So how would you type a letter with a word processor?
Well, you know, there's slight differences, but what I would probably do at the very top is I
might click the flush right button and then type in today's date. And I might hit enter a couple
of times and then hit the flush left button and type, dear Mary comma and then start typing my letter.
And then when I'm done, I might do something like hit the tab button seven times to move over just
past the middle of the page and I would type sincerely comma. And I'd hit enter three, four more
times to put a blank space and hit the tab seven more times and put my name Kevin O'Brien
or maybe just Kevin if this is a letter to someone I'm on fairly familiar terms with.
That's a business letter I'd put Kevin O'Brien and then I would hit space and hit tab seven more
times and put in my address, enter, hit tab seven more times, put in the rest of my address and so on.
Now, the thing that you want to think about is and this is what a real expert would start thinking
about don't all letters work mostly the same. Don't they have a lot of common features?
Why would you do all of that manual work over and over and over?
I used to say that the secret of my success with understanding computers and I'm not calling myself
the words foremost authority but there are some things I know fairly well and I've always said
that the reason that I get good at those things that I do know fairly well is that I am very lazy.
I'm lazy in the intelligent way which is to say I don't want to keep doing the same thing over and over
and that's the whole point about computers. Computers are a device for automating things that you do over
and over and over. In fact I would say anything I do more than twice I want to figure out how to
automate it. Now you can do that with word processing. You can give you can do all sorts of
wonderful things once you figure out the secrets to it. All right. So if we don't forget what we're
doing we can go in there and we can set it up so that I only need to do this once and then I've
got it there. So what does that mean? Well what that means is we need to be talking about two key
concepts templates and styles and these are the key. All right. Any word processor will have
templates and styles. In fact if they don't have it my feeling is it's not a word processor it's
a text editor. Nothing wrong with text editors okay they do serve a function in this life
and when you want to use one that's a great thing but a word processor is something more than a
text editor. It's something more than just a typewriter on steroids. It's something that has a
tremendous amount of power if you use it properly. Now before we get into this I want to talk about
something and if you're a programmer you're probably quite familiar with this already and this is
the concept of objects. So what do we mean by objects? You know in programming there is this
concept of object oriented programming. All right and that is to treat things it could be snippets
of code or what have you. We treat things as objects and those objects can move around. It can
appear in different places. So in a word processing document we can have all kinds of objects.
Some of them are probably going to seem fairly straightforward. If you ever put a graphic
into a word processing document you probably know that's an object and you'd be absolutely correct.
It is an object. What you might not be aware of is everything else on the page is an object.
A paragraph is an object. A heading is an object. A footnote is an object and so on. All of these
things are objects. Now objects have a number of characteristics that we want to keep in mind here.
I'm going to mention three of them. Objects have properties and there is now a general convention.
It may not apply 100% of the time but most of the time it does that the properties for any object
can be found on most computer systems by right clicking on the object and looking for the properties.
So if you have a word processing document open if you were to right click in the middle of a
paragraph you would see the paragraph properties. If you were right click on a photo you would see
photo properties. In fact right clicking on an object will often bring up a window that has
additional for instance with photos or graphical objects it might bring up a
not extensive but a lot of editing capabilities that you can edit this object.
You could create a graph in a spreadsheet application. Spreadsheet applications tend to have a lot of
graphing and take that object and put it into a word processing document and if you right click
on it it would often bring up the same properties you'd see if you were still in the spreadsheet
application with the same editing things. So that's the first thing. Objects have properties
and right clicking will generally get you to them. Another thing is that objects can function as
containers. In fact very often this is like those Russian dolls you've seen. Every doll has another
doll inside of it and that one has a doll inside of it and so on and just many levels of dolls
inside of dolls inside of dolls. What we are dealing with with office programs very often is objects
containing objects containing objects containing objects and they're just different levels of them.
One of the things that can lead to is something called inheritance. An object can inherit properties
in a number of ways either by being linked to another object in some way or by being contained
in another object that might influence what its properties are. I realize that's a little bit
abstract but please hold on to that idea of objects as we go forward in this series and I will
occasionally point out that hey we're dealing with objects here remember what I said
and that's going to help you to get a handle on that. Now templates. Templates and styles I
said are the key. What is it about templates? Well the way that office programs work is that they
are all based upon templates. So when you open up a word processing program and you see that blank
sheet of paper on the screen what actually happened in the background is that your word processing
program has a file that it thinks of as a template that says this is how new documents should look
and it is making a copy of that and so your new document is an object it is linked to another
object called a template and as a result it inherits properties from that link. So whatever you
had set up the template to do your new document will do. That's a very important concept.
Now we can have all kinds of templates and I think it's fairly straightforward when you look at
something like word processing and I think people have started to get a sense of that. What you
may not realize is that the same thing is true with spreadsheets. Your spreadsheet program when you
create a new spreadsheet is based on a template your slide deck program presentation graphics.
You create a new slide show based on a template and when you understand that then you understand
oh I could make my template do whatever I want to do. Now years ago I was responsible for training
all of the faculty and staff of a fairly small college and training them all using
Microsoft Office at the time. I think when I started it was Office 97 that I was teaching them
on and then what was next Office 2000. Don't even remember. But one of the things I remember
from back then is that Microsoft Office every time you started a new document it was always
times new Roman 10 point and 99 times out of 100 from what I could see the very first thing people
would do is change that to 12 point because 10 point is really too damn small. I have no idea what
they were thinking of but I frequently feel that way with Microsoft so people would have to go
and change that. Now what I did was I just went into the template and I changed the template.
So from that I just made that one change in the template and then from then on every time I
opened it up instead of being 10 point it was 12 point automatically. People would occasionally see
that. How did you do that? Well I'd show them how. It can be so much more.
I did a demonstration when I was at Ohio Linux Fest and I taught a two hour session on Libra Office
at Ohio Linux Fest this past year just about a month ago now and one of the things that when I
got for a Libra Office writer I simply opened up a new document and then without touching the keyboard
or the mouse or doing anything I had people take a look at the screen and say what can you see
on the screen and eventually they started to realize oh your document has opened saying
heading one and yeah that's right your document opened with the cursor in the middle of the page
that's right and I would say that's because for what I do for my workflow that made a lot of sense.
The heading one is the title of your document I tend to put the I tend to center my titles
on the document so I simply set it up in the template open up everything that way ready to go
and then we would go on through doing various other things and I'll show you more about how you
automate all of these things so the point of what we're talking about here is that you could
set up the template to do that and then you don't need to manually change everything every time
you go in there so that's an example of what I call using it intelligently so this is our
introduction and I'm going to get into the nuts and bolts next time I'm going to actually take you
through changing the default template in Libra Office and maybe even talk about setting up some
other templates and explain exactly how you do that and then we'll get into styles and we're just
going to have a wonderful time going through all this so this is a hookah signing off catch you later bye
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