Category: Community

 To change the number of a page – for instance, if you add a new document to a series which has to be compiled into a single book at the end of the year – you must put the cursor somewhere in the first paragraph of the page and access the menu Format > Paragraph. Inside the multi tab dialog window, you have to open the Text Flow tab (shown in the image on the left), and in the Break section check the Insert box – with Type “Page” and Position “Before” – and the With Page Style box, using Default Style. Then, you enter the Page Number in the box on the right and confirm by hitting the OK button. You will immediately see the new page number in the footer.

 LibreOffice Presenter Screen is a useful tool for presenters, as the name implies. Unfortunately, only a minority of Impress users are leveraging this feature, which can be activated with a few easy steps:

1. Open the Display (or Screen) control panel, and turn Mirroring Off.

2. Configure the Impress Slide Show Settings with the menu Slide Show > Slide Show Settings, and in the Multiple Display area select the appropriate screen for the presentation (usually, it is named “screen number 2” or “alternate screen” or “secondary screen”).

3. Launch the presentation hitting F5 or using the menu Slide Show > Start from First Slide.

The slide should show on the second screen (usually, the projector) while the Presenter Screen should appear on the screen of your PC or laptop.

Thanks to the Presenter Screen, you can visualize the current and the next slide, plus the notes (if necessary) or the slide sorter (should you jump to a different slide in the presentation, without showing that you are searching for it). In addition, you can see the time of the day, and the time of the presentation.

LibreOffice allows left-handed users to move the vertical scroll bar from the right side to the left side of the screen with a simple procedure. You must open LibreOffice Options dialog window with the menu Tools > Options… Then, go first to the Language Settings > Languages window to set the document language to Asian, and second to the LibreOffice Writer > View window to set the vertical ruler as left aligned.

LibreOffice will immediately move the vertical scroll bar to the left of the screen. This will help left handed users to avoid crossing the screen with the mouse cursor each time they need to scroll the document.

 LibreOffice Calc allows to select a large number of cells without using the mouse (which might be rather awkward if the area is extremely large). To select the area, it is necessary to enter the range in the Name Box. For instance, to select the cells between A1 and I20, as in the picture on the left, you enter A1:I20 and press Enter on the keyboard.

LibreOffice allows to add comments to Writer documents, with the menu Insert > Comment (shortcut: Ctrl+Alt+C). Comments can be added to a single word, a sentence, a paragraph, a link, or a specific point in the text. This feature is useful, for instance, to collect comments on a document before the final version. Comments have a different color for each user, to make it easier to attribute them to the right person. The down arrow on the right side of each comment allows to delete the single comment, all comments from an author, all comments from all authors, or to format all comments.

LibreOffice offers a powerful search and replace option of regular expressions – like, for instance, tabs, soft line breaks and empty paragraphs – based on the powerful International Components for Unicode (ICU) Regular Expressions engine. A complete list of the regular expressions can be found on the ICU Project website.

A list of the regular expressions most used by LibreOffice can be accessed via the dialog windows which opens when you enter Edit > Find & Replace… Clicking on the Other Options… arrow, you expand the list, from which you can select Regular Expressions. Hitting the Help button opens the relevant help page.

Half way down the page, under Regular Expression, you can find a link to the list. Additional links at the end of the page provide further info on the topic.