What is Writer?

What do you use your word processor for? Jotting down notes to yourself? Writing letters? Or publishing an entire book with style sheets, automated indexing and table of contents generation, as well as bibliographies? Whether your needs are large or small, Writer is up to the job. Figure 1-1 is an example of a Writer document. Look familiar? This book was written in

OpenOffice.org. Of course, Writer does all the basic things that word processors do, but it

also allows you to do much more including:

· Design and create your own Web pages.

· Create forms for automatically inputting data into databases.

· Create personalized documents with Mail Merge, and link to your e-mail address book or external database.

· Use Text Frames and Linking to lay out such documents as newsletters and flyers.

· Automatically generate standard documents such as letters, faxes, agendas, minutes, or import or create your own templates.

· Create your own Style Sheets

· Import seventeen different types of text documents with ease, including “doc”, and “dot”; and export nineteen different file formats, including “pdf”, “html” and three kinds of “doc”s.

· Automatic indexing, tables of contents, bibliographical references; plus such details as custom headers, footers, footnotes, and endnotes.

· Track changes; compare documents, Automatic outlining, Spellchecking, and Thesaurus.

· Automatically correct words, or automatically complete words as you type. (This is all completely customizable, of course.)

· Insert Dynamic fields (such as date and time) and hyperlinks.

· Connect to e-mail software.

Create and use macros.