Tips and tricks

OpenOffice.org 3 Writer Guide

Chapter 3: Working with Text

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• Selecting text
• Cutting, copying, and pasting text
• Finding and replacing text and formatting
• Inserting special characters
• Formatting paragraphs
• Formatting characters
• Autoformatting
• Creating numbered or bulleted lists
• Using footnotes and endnotes
• Checking spelling
• Using language tools
• Using the thesaurus
• Hyphenating words
• Using word completion
• Using AutoText
• Line numbering
• Undoing and redoing changes
• Tracking changes to a document
• Inserting notes
• Linking to another part of a document
• Working with hyperlinks
• Tips and tricks

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Switching between insert and overwrite mode

With the keyboard, press Insert to toggle between overwrite mode and insert mode. In insert mode, any text after the cursor position moves forward to make room for the text you type; in overwrite mode, text after the cursor position is replaced by the text you type. The current mode is displayed on the Status Bar.

With the mouse, click in the area on the Status Bar that indicates the current mode in order to switch to the other mode.

Counting the words in a selection

Select a block of text and choose Tools > Word Count. OOo displays the number of words and characters in the selection as well as the number of words in the document. You can also see the number of words and characters (and other information) in the entire document in File > Properties > Statistics.

If you are writing a document which needs to contain a fixed number of words, you may want to insert in the header or footer of the document a word count field so that you can quickly check where you are. To do that, move the cursor into the header or footer, then select Insert > Field > Other. In the dialog box that opens, go to the Document page and select Statistics as the Type, Words in the Select list, and Arabic (1 2 3) as the Format, then click Insert.