Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with openoffice

How do I make an OpenOffice spreadsheet display a cell in bold if the date in the cell is in the past?

jesirose — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:56:21 -0800

How do I make an OpenOffice spreadsheet display a cell in bold if the date in the cell is in the past? The cell currently contains a formula to display the date which is one week after the date in another cell:

=DATE(YEAR(B3);MONTH(B3);DAY(B3)+7)

How can I use the IF() and STYLE() functions to make the cell bold if that date is today or in the past? I've used the IF() before so I understand how it works but I can't figure out STYLE() or how to compare dates. Or if this is even possible.

How can I better track my kid's feeding schedule and progress?

The Giant Squid — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 21:10:22 -0800

NeoOffice (or OpenOffice) Filter: Can anybody point me to the NeoOffice/OpenOffice formulas for comparing time (in minutes or seconds) between two dates? Sorry for asking this, AskMeFites. Normally, I'd tackle this one myself, but, as my son is a whopping 12 days old right now, I'm not getting a heck of a lot of sleep these days. I'm trying to generate a graph of the time between his feedings, and the length of each of his feedings.

I've been meticulously tracking all of it so far, but I could use a little help with the NeoOffice/OpenOffice functions. So:

How do I calculate absolute time (in seconds or minutes) between two dates/timestamps in NeoOffice?

Mac word processor for academic writing in the humanities?

synecdoche — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:13:39 -0800

I don't like Microsoft Word much; it feels really bloated to me, and has so many features I never use. I've been looking for an alternative for some time. What word processor does the hivemind recommend for academic writing? I am a graduate student, about to tackle the beast that is my dissertation, and am hoping to find one word processing program (that is hopefully not Word) that I can use for it as well as the other articles and such that I need to work on. I've been waiting on the official release for OpenOffice 3 (for the native Mac support), but in the current lull in the school year, I was hoping to test the waters and find what works best for me.

My writing is usually pretty straightforward. I have no need for elaborate figures, mathematical symbols, or anything like that. I'm in the humanities, and if it works with MLA format, with occasional forays into, say, Chicago, that's good enough for me. But, on the other hand, I'd like something that produces documents that are portable enough that, if need be, I can use Word or OpenOffice on the school's computers, and can easily send something off to a journal without having to re-format the entire document because it got garbled in translation. I also occasionally receive (and provide) feedback from professors and colleagues who use Word's "Track Changes" and "Insert Comment" features; support for these things would be nice, too.

Oh, and I also use spreadsheets as part of my research workflow.

Am I stuck with keeping Office on my computer? Or can I switch to something else completely? What about Mellel?

Cheap is good, too.

Splitting Strings in Spreadsheets?

l33tpolicywonk — Fri, 30 May 2008 18:49:20 -0800

Using OpenOffice Calc (Spreadsheets) - Is there any way to divide the strings in one column into two by the space in each cell? I've got a contact list formatted in CSV - only problem is that the whole name for each contact is connected in the one column and I want to. Is there any way to automate this?

Autocomplete in Pages?

spaceman_spiff — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:14:29 -0800

How can I get Pages to mimic Open Office's autocomplete? I've recently made a partial switch from Open Office/NeoOffice to Pages. I like the way Pages does styles, and it's a lot lighter weight on my Powerbook than OO/NO. But it's missing my absolute to-die-for favorite feature - autocomplete.

In Open Office, as I type, words longer than a certain threshold are added to a list; if I type the first 3-4 letters of a word in the list later on in a document, the rest of the word appears highlighted after my cursor, and I can choose to hit enter and complete the word, or just keep typing. It's absolutely fabulous, and my wrists are complaining bitterly about Pages' lack of a similar feature. Is there a plugin or hack - or best of all a checkbox I missed - for Pages that would replicate this feature?

Bibliography management for Macs

philosophygeek — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:46:50 -0800

I am beginning to write articles for publication as well as starting with my doctoral dissertation. I am looking for a bibliography manager that will be compatible with Microsoft Word for Mac or OpenOffice for Mac/NeoOffice (these document formats are necessary since many journals require .doc submissions, so no LaTeX recommendations). Specific features I need:
- Ability to generate in-line, footnote, and end-of-document reference info
- Ability to customize citation formats for odd sources within my field
- Ability to choose a different citation style (so I can alter the formatting to meet the requirements of multiple journals).
- Free is strongly preferred

My institution has a RefWorks subscription, but I don't think I will be able to access my account after I graduate, so I'd prefer another option.

While Google tells me that OpenOffice and the Windows version of Word have basic citation abilities, I have been unable to determine if they have all of these capabilities.

How can I automate lining up cells in excel or open office?

[expletive deleted] — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:06:24 -0800

Is there a way to automate this very tedious spreadsheet task? I am currently aggregating the sales and inventory data for three stores that share inventory. Unfortunately, the software we are using won't allow us to export both sales and inventory in stock to the same spreadsheet.

To make matters worse, we can't delete unused inventory codes, so my inventory export is 18000 rows long. A sales export will typically only use between 500 and 2000 of these codes, and I have to go line by line, inserting cells so the sales data lines up with the inventory. Line by line, for 18000 rows. I have to do this three times, once for each store.

To make things even worse, I've been suffering from intense migraines lately, and this isn't making them better.

I was wondering if there was a way to automate the process of getting cells with a given code, and the associated cells with the sales data to line up with the cells of inventory data. The codes are a letter or series of letters followed by a dash and a 4 digit number, for example A-1134, ECO-0045. A few codes for various reasons don't adhere to this standard, like OM-4 or H-2334.5.

If this isn't clear, I'll try to provide a concrete example.

I use Open Office at work, but I have access to Excel if needed.

I hope turning scribblings into a book isn't quite as hard as lead into gold.

Ctrl_Alt_ep — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:32:00 -0800

Software that will format a large amount of text? I'm sorry if this is a dumb question, but a couple of weeks of looking hasn't yielded anything that would work. I've had a look here, but I don't think any of the answers were what I need.

What I have is a bunch of large documents with unformatted text (>200 000 words). It is in a number of .txt, Word and OpenOffice files. It doesn't all need to end up in the same file, but that would be nice. What I would like to do is to compile it and divide it into two columns. I would also like to be able to add headings and titles where necessary, as well as numbering the pages. Being able to insert pictures and diagrams, and document and chapter titles in the top left and right hand corners would be a major bonus.

I know I can do most of this with Word, but a couple hundred pages of tables that need to be aligned just right doesn't seem like fun.

It doesn't matter what OS the solution runs on and I would prefer to spend as little money possible.

Thanks Mefites!

Spreadsheet average help

regicide is good for you — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 13:39:23 -0800

I'd like a spreadsheet (OpenOffice Calc) to give me the average of the numbers in a certain row that will be filled over a period of months, and I'd like the formula for the average to remain valid even as I fill it, cell by cell. How? For instance, in month 2, cells A1 and B1 will have a number; cells C1-G1 will be empty. Cell H1 should display the average of A1 and B1. In month 3, C1 will have a number and D1-G1 will be empty; H1 should show the average of A1-C1, but without me changing the formula in H1 to divide by 3 instead of 2.

I want to be able to do this since I'm using many many different rows of data. I'm guessing this might be possible. Is there a formula to let the spreadsheet know to divide only by the number of non-empty cells in the row?

Thanks.

How to set Open Office Writer language and font settings for good?

sudasana — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 16:47:16 -0800

How do I keep language settings and fonts consistent in Open Office Writer (2.3.1)? I'm tearing out my hair over Open Office. I use the Writer program (presently 2.3.1) for my work, and there are two problems that I've been unable to solve.

1) How do I set the default spell check language for documents and not have it reset when I create a new file? Right now I have to manually set this to English (USA) each time I create a new document.

2) How do I set the default font for different languages? I often type documents in Chinese and English, but Writer keeps using a nasty font for inputting Chinese and I have to change it manually every time.

Please offer some advice, these things are really killing me during finals season.

Open Source version of MS Publisher?

worker_bee — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 05:26:06 -0800

Is there an open-source equivalent to MS Publisher? My son needs to do a project for his English class that has to look like a newsletter and Publisher would seem to be the easiest way to achieve the required look. Before I download the free trial I wondered if there was an Open Office type equivalent. Thanks.

Page Style Creation in OpenOffice Writer

jlkr — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:23:32 -0800

I'm using OpenOffice Writer 2.2 (Windows XP). I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to define a page style from a page I've already created, short of writing everything down and recreating the page. There's got to be a better way. And, supposedly, there is. But the help page entitled "Creating a Page Style Based on the Current Page" tells me how to create page styles with different headers. I already know how to do that. I've spent hours tweaking this page style to fit what I need, and I want to use it again. I've Googled, and checked the OOBlogs and the OOWiki, but can't find what I need.

How do I get rid of the comma in Calc?

the number 17 — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 03:34:35 -0800

I am not happy with the decimal separator for my locale in Calc, anyone know how to go about fixing it? OpenOffice Calc thinks that the decimal separator for my locale (Greek) should be the comma. I would rather use a dot, as is common in a scientific or technical setting.

It looks like there is no easy way to change this, appart from using a different locale. FAQs suggest using an English format as default for Calc cells, but that is not a real solution, as it messes up date formating and won't work with literal values in formulas.

I probably have the technical skills to fix this, but can't afford to spend then next three months studying OO sources over something like this. A new locale ( something like "Greek (Alternate)" ) would be ideal for me, but I don't know how invasive this kind of change is: Do I have to fudge with an xml file somewhere, or do I need to patch the source and recompile everything?

If anyone around here has experience contributing to OO, do you think I should follow through with this or just shut up and use a comma ?

I realise this is a Bad Idea on several levels, but the comma really bugs me - Help me decide wether I fix this or let it go

OpenOffice Chart Question

vilcxjo_BLANKA — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 08:47:59 -0800

How can I make OpenOffice charts with a non-standard origin. I want to make charts whose X and Y values range over small intervals. That is to say, X goes from, 1900 to 2000, by 10s, and Y goes from, say 150e6.0 to 200e6.0. The charts I can make all seem to want the lower left hand corner to be at y=0, which means that the chart looks a lot like a vertical line.

Since this comes from a spreadsheet, I could make a column which has $y-min($y) to normalize it, though this seems like something I should not have to do. But then the labels are not the values but the normalized values.

Perhaps the problem is that I don't really know how to make OO charts. I'm just guessing, given the contents of the help files. But this is driving me crazy.

Tnx in advance.

What is a good user / "client-side" alternative to using the Internet Explorer right-click "export to Excel" feature?

NikitaNikita — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 11:29:59 -0800

What is a good user / "client-side" alternative to using the Internet Explorer right-click "export to Excel" feature? My work-at-home project requires me to right-click on a website's table, then choose "Export to Excel" in order to take that data, save it as a spreadsheet, and have my boss sign off on it. It sounds like "export to excel" is something that occurs via Internet Explorer, not the website per se, but I am not sure.

Is there any way to get around this situation considering:

a) I don't personally own Excel, but do have Open Office and Google Spreadsheets

b) the few times I tried it on a computer with Excel it didnt work anyway

I'd really like a non-excel way to do this. I'm not attached to IE, so if there's a quick Mozilla friendly way to export my work to my supervisor, that would be great too.

thanks in advance everyone!

Why do my videos always look so shoddy in PowerPoint?

handee — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 07:05:01 -0800

What video formats work well in presentations? Advice on codecs, presentation software and general tips and tricks sought. Linux and/or WIndows. I always seem to end up writing my presentations at the last minute (yeah, right) and they have to include video. The job of preparing the videos takes ages. I do all my video work in Quicktime, for historical reasons, but getting that into PowerPoint or OpenOffice seems unreasonably difficult. RIght now I've fallen back to outputting a stack of jpegs and turning those into a video with ffmpeg, which looks great when I play it back in mplayer, or when I copy it to the Windows box and play it in VLC viewer, but the result looks terrible in PowerPoint.

Am I using the wrong video format? The wrong presentation software?

2 + 46% = ?

Solomon — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 05:50:12 -0800

I need some really REALLY basic spreadsheet help. I've been given the task of creating a spreadsheet that will work out for us several things - how many orders we need in total and per week, how much revenue this will bring, etc. I've got most of it worked out, but I can't for the life of me how to work out percentages. Yes, I did Google this before asking. :D I have a number, say 765. I need a formula to work out what various percentages of this are - 80% of 765 = nnnn, 45% of 765 = nnnn etc. I also need a formula that will add a percentage to this number - 765 + 19% = nnnn for example.

I'd prefer it if this was in the format of "multiply number by X then divide by Y then clap your hands 3 times", than something more esoteric. Mainly because I can get my head round that, and also I can prove it's working to my boss on a calculator (he is even more clueless at mathematics than I am!). I have a very dim recollection of multiply by 100 then divide by the percentage you want, but I can't get that to work.

I'm using OpenOffice Calc 2.0.4 to create the spreadsheet.

Sorting data in Open Office

Eekacat — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 17:19:31 -0800

Open Office Calc and sorting data question. I have some Excel spreadsheets I use, but not wanting to pay for excel I am using Open Office 2.0. This is a simplification of the data, but say that you have columns of countries, states, cities, and street names. At the top of each column is a pulldown selection list of the different names in that column. What I used to be able to do in Excel was to be able to pull down the column for say Cities and select the city name, then the pulldown selection lists for the other columns would only show the choices available for the first selection: so only the countries that had that city, and streets that were in that city would be in the other menus, and so on until you had the data rows you wanted according to your known data parameters. I hope that wasn't too horribly confusing. Can Open Office be configured to do this???

How can I skin/change the theme of OpenOffice 2.x for Windows?

remixer96 — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 20:54:40 -0800

How can I skin/change the theme of OpenOffice 2.x for Windows?

What can a Linux fan use for consistent note taking and archival?

a007r — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 16:35:46 -0800

I am studying in human science (psychology), and I'm starting university next month. I have been using a laptop running Linux to take notes and write assignments during the past two years or so, but I feel my current technique for note taking is unsatisfactory. My current method is this: fire up OpenOffice Writer with a blank document, start typing in bullet-list form, with a Heading1 title at the top of the document, and save the document as "yyyy-mm-dd-topic.odt" in a folder such as school/the_subject/*. Whenever a semester is over, I compress the files into a tar.gz archive and put it in an archival folder. This prevents me from having the files indexed by Tracker.

- must have: formatting controlled by a central/GLOBAL STYLESHEET, unicode, open source, runs on Linux
- nice to have: OpenDocument, drawing support, autosave, wysiwyg, ability to zoom text to disproportionate sizes (those 1280x1024 widescreen laptops strain the eyes easily)
- don't care about: spellcheck
- don't want: proprietary stuff, obscure file format, latex, a database

I have been scratching my head over this for a little while, so far I see these options: OpenOffice, plain text with Gedit or whatever, Abiword, coding XHTML by hand on the fly, using Tomboy (but it is slow), using a wiki such as PmWiki running on a local server on this laptop, none of which particularily seem to fill my needs completely. Please let me know of any other possibilities I have overlooked!

Latex (even Wyneken) are beyond my understanding, and I feel they are overkill for note taking (maybe when I end up writing a huge thesis or something...)

I want everything I write to be accessible 20 years later. Actually, I have only two big criticisms against my current OpenOffice technique: it forces me to load openoffice (which does "feel" heavier than most text processors), and the contents' style is per-document, not system-wide (like in a CSSed page collection or in Latex).
A criticism I have against PmWiki (the only wiki I tested, but it uses no database, and that is nice) is that filenames it creates don't really support non-english characters properly, and I have to concede that is a limitation of the web itself; accents mess up nicely in URLs, and pmWiki doesn't like to have them on the filesystem either; actually, the problem may lie in the fact that it feels like I have "less control" over the filesystem since it uses all those WikiWordFileNamesThings. Furthermore, editing in a wiki is not exactly WYSIWYG. You have a very easy syntax, and it has the advantage to use CSS over all your documents at once, but you cannot "visually" distinguish a header paragraph from a regular paragraph, not as easily as you would in a WYSIWYG application (you have to save to do that). Printing is also a bit tricky, and a wiki is, to a certain extent, a bit of annoying maintenance to deal with (security upgrades for example).

I like solutions that "respect" my filesystem instead of forcing me into a set style of folders, or worse, a database; I backup and synchronize notes between my laptop and my desktop over the network using Rsync scripts I wrote.

I am "more inclined" towards certain file formats so far: OpenDocument or xhtml, but feel free to suggest something else. I mean I don't quite like RTF, but if it's guaranteed to work everywhere anytime, it could be useful; or even taking notes in plain text in front of a laptop without X.org would be possible (but pretty friggin radical! :).

Actually, I'm realizing that I'm typing this in Gedit, a plain text / code editor, but that's only because I do not trust the Web (even if my browser never crashed) and don't want to lose a long post.

Thoughts? Experiences? Recommendations? Questions? :) I realize there *is* note-taking software out there such as Gournal or Jarnal if I remember correctly, but are those really the end all solution? A computer certainly does not behave like a physical paper notebook, and I'm especially interested in the "way" (or maybe the medium) the notes are taken in (if you have special techniques, I'm also interested), not really specific applications. I know this is a weird question, I will try clarifying as soon as possible if you have needs for clarification.

Why does my openoffice keep crashing?

Old Man Wilson — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 21:22:33 -0800

Why does openoffice keep shutting itself down? So, I've been using OpenOffice on my macbook for probably the past 5 weeks or so with no problems. After I installed x11, everything has been running like a dream...

Until tonight that is...

Every time I open OpenOffice it just shuts itself down, leaving only x11 open. No matter how I go about openings, with a blank document or a previously written document, it just shuts down.

Has this ever happened to anyone before? What should I be looking for to get to the root of my problem?

Thanks.

OpenOffice to Word Conversion Needed

mikewas — Wed, 10 May 2006 05:45:49 -0800

How can I convert OpenOffice formatted files to MS Word? I have several hundred files created and saved in OpenOffice writer with the native OpenOffice format (some OO 1.1, some OO 2.0). I need to open these files using MS Word. (You need reasons? OK. I've already got a full legal copy of Word and I've tried using NeoOffice on my Mac but it's too slow and self-confessedly buggy to be usable.)

I have access to Word on both Mac and Windows; I have OpenOffice for Windows; I have Windows and Mac boxen. What I don't have is the time to open each file in OO and "save as Word format. Is there a way to batch convert these files from OO to Word? Am I doomed to a day of "open, save as, close"?

Help me, MeFi. You're my only hope.

What did I just do in OpenOffice!?

Harry — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 05:57:59 -0800

I've done something (in the Navigator?) in OpenOffice that created a read-only duplicate of a chapter of the piece I'm writing. I now have two identical chapters, and I can't delete or undo the creation of that duplicate, because it's read only.

I think it might've happened when I experimented with some 'drag options' in the Navigator screen. I only realized I had two identical chapters much later on, and to my annoyance noticed the copy was read-only.

Was it a bug? Or a strange feature? And how do I get rid of a read-only chapter (it's on a single page, so it may be just a copied page instead of a chapter)!?

Seamlessness between Open Office and Microsoft Office?

NoMich — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 12:03:27 -0800

Let's say that I got a new computer without MS Office on it and I install Open Office. Let's also say a person sends me a Word or Excel file via email. Will I be able to read it and edit it in Open Office without messing up the format? If I make any changes to the file and email it back to my friend, will he be able to read it and make further edits to it while using the Microsoft Office applications?

Why can't robot servants help with this?

ducksauce — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 13:09:21 -0800

Help with re-formatting a word document? I had a perfectly formatted document in 8.5 x 11. I just found out it has to be in 6 x 9 instead. This is an enormous, enormous headache. First, are there any applications out there that could convert this for me, appropriate shrinking fonts and mathematically changing margins to just "shrink" the page? I have access to MS Word, OpenOffice, and Adobe Acrobat.

If not, I've run into a problem while doing it manually. If I use Word, Word will not let me change an indent on a pre-loaded style from 3.25" to 2.25". Word says that the indent is too large (even though I'm making it smaller). Why must Word judge me so?! When I do the same thing in OpenOffice of course it lets me change the indent, but then the style does not automatically update, which baffles me.

Help?