Now when you read the title of this blog post, did you actually know what we meant by “Writer fields”? Be honest. Most people, even those who have used the suite for years, don’t actually know what they are and what they’re used for. There isn’t anything wrong with that, it’s not an essential field that you have to use in every document you create but they can actually be rather helpful in some circumstances. In this article, we’re going to describe to you what they are and how you’ll be able to add them yourself.
Fields are a good way of placing certain values into your document without you having to enter them manually. For example, the page number of each page in your document. This is something you could add manually but could get very repetitive if you have a large number of pages, having to write the number on manually get add a lot of time to your workload. You’ll be able to add others such as the current date and time, the author of the document and many now. Now that you know what they can do, we’re going to explain how you can add them in Open Office.
The first thing you need to do is to open up the office suite and then go into the Writer tool, which you’ll need to be using to take advantage of this feature. You need to load up the document you’re working on, the one where you want to add fields into it. You can then go into Insert –> Fields, which is where you’ll find a list of all of the different fields that you’re allowed to add. Whenever you click on one of them in the list, the actual value will be added to your document. You can use fields in any way you want – for example you could create a layout such as having “Page 4 of 7″ in the footer by using two separate fields.
You can of course use these wherever you want in the document but we recommend that you stick to headers and footers, which is where they’re normally used. You’ll find that the values they hold are automatically updated if the circumstances change, for example if you add or remove pages. You may be required to add more information for some fields depending on what you plan on doing. There are much more than just the ones you see on the list, click “Other” to find other categories such as “Statistics” and “Templates”. It’s a good idea to look through the full list before you actually use any to make sure you’re using the best one for you.
In conclusion, fields are something that are really helpful when you’re designing and publishing documents. Whenever possible it’s a good idea to automate tasks like entering page numbers because there simply is no gain at all by doing it all yourself. Fields act as placeholders and constantly calculate the results for you without you having to worry, it means you can just concentrate on the important things. Our Open Office download includes many of these additional features which are aimed at making your life easier, so if you haven’t installed it onto your system yet we recommend that you go ahead and do so now.