Open, close a word processing application. Open, close documents.
To start Writer, click on the ‘Start’ button on your Windows machine. Click on ‘All Programs’ and then go to the ‘LibreOffice’ folder in the list of all programs which gets displayed. Click on the ‘LibreOffice’ folder and then click on ‘LibreOffice Writer’. This will start the Writer application.
When Writer is started, the main window opens which has been shown below.
The highlighted portion shown in the above illustration is the ‘Main Menu Bar’. This is the most important menu bar in the Writer application and most of the operations in Writer can be performed from here. In this tutorial, we are going to use the main menu bar for performing a variety of different operations.
To close Writer, simply click on the ‘white cross icon with red background’ on the upper right corner of the Writer main window screen. This will close Writer.
Once the application has been started, then a new document can be opened. To open a new document, click on ‘File’ from the main menu bar. From the resulting drop-down, click on ‘New’ and from the sub-menu which is displayed, click on ‘Text Document’. This will open a new document.
To close a document, simply click on the same ‘white cross icon with a red background’ from the top right corner of the document screen.
Create a new document based on default template, other available template like: memo, fax, and agenda.
A default template is the one, which is used to create documents when any new document is created. This means that when we create a new document, it gets created based on the default template which has been set.
We are going to learn how to set a default template in the subsequent chapters. But to create a new document based on the default template, simply follow the steps which have been given in the last section for opening a new document. This creates a new document based on the default template.
To create documents based on the other available templates, click on ‘File’ from the main menu bar. From the resulting drop-down, click on ‘New’ and from the sub-menu which is displayed, click on ‘Templates’. This will open the ‘Template Manager’ dialog box.
This dialog box, under the ‘Documents’ tab, displays the different template categories available for creating new documents. You can select any of these by double clicking and this will display the different templates under that category. Double click on the required template and this will create a new document based on this template.
Save a document to a location on a drive. Save a document under another name to a location on a drive.
Once the changes to a Document have been made, we need to save this document to a location on our computer. To save a document, click on ‘File’ from the main menu bar. From the resulting drop-down, click on ‘Save As’. This opens the ‘Save As’ dialog box.
In this dialog box, we can browse to the folder where we want to save the document file and thus select the appropriate location. To change the name by which the file will get saved, just enter the new name in the ‘File Name:’ field. After making these changes, click on ‘Save’. This will save the file to the location which has been specified and under the given file name.
Save a document as another file type like: text file, Rich Text Format, template, software specific file extension, version number.
To save a document as another file type, follow the same steps as given above. This will open the ‘Save As’ dialog box. In this dialog box, under the ‘Save as type:’ field, select the appropriate file type as per the requirement and then click on ‘Save’. This will save the document as the selected file type.
Switch between open documents.
You can open multiple documents at a time in Writer. In such a case, to switch between these documents, just click on the ‘Writer’ icon on the task bar of your computer. This icon will always get displayed whenever you are running Writer on your machine.
When this icon is clicked, then the names of all the active documents get displayed as has been shown above. Simply click on the name of the document which you want to open and that document will get opened. You can switch between different documents using this method.