If you're trying to make money online, then you most certainly know the importance of building a list. One way to have people sign up for your newsletter, is to offer them free guides. And in order to write free guides efficiently you need to be relatively good with your word processor.

In this series of tutorials, you will learn the basics of OpenOffice / LibreOffice Writer (which you can download for free at http://www.libreoffice.org/), so you can make your own e-books easily. Part 1 will be accessible publicly, the other parts will be published in a free e-book reserved to the members of this site (membership is free too). So sign up now so you can be informed when the e-book is made available!

1) Let's move some bad habits out of the way

One of the things you need to do right now, is to get rid of some bad habits you probably have:

• Most people would use the [TAB] key or worst the [SPACE] key repeatedly to move something to the right. This is long, complicated, and very imprecise! There are better ways to do this.
• Most people would also press the [RETURN] key repeatedly in order to create a new page.
• Applying the same formatting 20 times in 20 different places is long and tedious, especially when you could be using styles!

So we'll start with these three common bad habits and then we will realize a complete e-book, with chapters, sections, tables, pictures, and lists. This is the best way to learn the basics.

Move a content to the right

Have you noticed the ruler that stands just above your document? It looks like this:

You can move the two arrows I have outlined here. The top one will allow you to automatically move the first line of a paragraph. The other one (which will move the top arrow at the same time) will move all the content to the right. Note that there is a visual help in the form of a vertical dotted line that helps you position them precisely. This effect will be applied starting at the line your cursor is positioned at, and at all the new lines your create from there, until you change the setting. You could also select several lines (you can select the whole  document actually...) and apply it to an already existing text.

An other way of moving a content to the right is, still with the ruler, to define your own custom size of tabulation. This way, instead of using the [TAB] key several times, you'll use it only once. To do this, you simply need to left-click in the ruler, where the numbers are, and release the button. You'll notice a new mark appears, like this:

You can now press the [TAB] key and your cursor will be positioned precisely there!

You can define several custom tabulation intervals, and you can remove those you don't need anymore by dragging them out of the ruler into your document. You can also move them laterally in order to readjust them.

Create a new page

This one is easy, you have no idea! Just use the key combination [CTRL][RETURN] and that's it! Isn't it easier than hitting [RETURN] 30 times?

Using styles

Styles are a very powerful tool. Imagine you are writing a document that has chapters and sub-sections, each chapter title should look the same, as should each sub-section, so the document looks consistent. You can either:

• Apply to each chapter title: font size 16, bold, color blue, underlined.
• Or define a unique style, which you will name "chaptertitle", and which will have the characteristics: font size 16, bold, color blue, underlined. Then you would apply that style to each chapter title.

If you only have a couple of titles it might not make much sense, but imagine you have twenty. Would you rather apply 20 times each individual settings (in this example, 4 settings multiplied by 20 titles that's 80 manipulations!), or create a style that you will apply to each title - which means, only ONE manipulation per title? I'm sure it makes more sense now...

So here is how to define and apply your own styles. First, take a look at the tool bar at the top of the OpenOffice window, roughly in the same area where the basic formatting tools are (font size, bold, italic etc). You will notice this drop-down box:

Open it and you will discover that there are already some predefined styles - which you can modify, and you can also add your own. There are some title styles in there, named Heading 1, Heading 2, etc... Keep them in mind, they are important: these particular styles are recognized by OpenOffice when making an automatic index (which will be explained in an other chapter of this tutorial). So when making titles, take the good habit to always use these, and use them in order (the main title of a document should be Heading 1, its chapters Heading 2, sub-chapters Heading 3 etc).

We're now going to modify one of them, and the best way to go is probably to open the Styles window. So either go to the menu Format and click on "Styles and formatting" or press the [F11] key. It looks like this:

Select one of the styles and make a right click on it, a contextual menu will appear, offering you the option to modify that style. The edition window pops up:

You will probably mainly be interested in the "font" tab where you can edit the basic font characteristics like font size, weight (bold or not), etc. Explore the different options if you like, you'll see you can make your style look any way you want it to. When finished, click OK.

Note that creating a new  style from scratch would have been similar, except you would have clicked on "new" instead of "modify".

Now that you have the styles you need, it's time to apply them. This is really easy: select the text you want to apply the style to, then either double-click on the chosen style in the styles window, or pick one from the drop-down we were talking about earlier!

Now here's the magic of styles: everywhere you need to apply a particular formatting, you only need to select the right style. And if after applying a given style 50 times you decide that finally no, these should really be in red instead of blue, well... You don't have to make 50 modifications. You need to make just one: go back to editing your style, change its characteristics, save it and watch... The formatting "automagically" reflects your changes everywhere the style has been applied!

This first part is now complete. The next parts will be delivered in an e-book reserved to the members, so if you wish to be told when this e-book becomes available (probably within a week after the publication of this article), and more importantly if you wish to be able to download it, I'd suggest you sign up.

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