Test Driving Linux

Writer Basics

In most ways, you'll find that Writer operates a lot like Microsoft Word. It has many of the same features; they're just in different places. This section will familiarize you with the basics of Writer.

You can launch Writer by clicking K Menu→ Use office tools→ Create a text document. Be prepared for a wait—Writer takes a long time to open not only when it's launched from a live CD, but it takes about 10 seconds even when it is installed to your hard drive. Happily, though, load times are improving with each new release.

When Writer comes up, you'll see a window that looks a lot like Word: menus along the top, icon bar just below that, and a large space just waiting for you to start typing.

Open and Save Files

To open a file, select File→ Open or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-O. In the Open window, browse through the filesystem, select the desired file, and click the Open button. This browse dialog is similar to what you see in KDE applications, but not identical. This is because OpenOffice.org is not a KDE application, and therefore doesn't use KDE's built-in methods to open and save files.

To save a document, just select File→ Save or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-S. If it's a new document, Writer asks where you want to save the file. If it's an existing document, Writer just saves on top of the previous version.

If you want to put the file in a different directory or change the filename or file type, select File→ Save As. Make the appropriate selections in the ...