OOW switch - Milestone achieved

I am delighted to announce that I have just successfully completed recreating my monthly report template in Open Office Writer. I still need to create a new version for each report, but with the template done, that will be simple.

NB: today's efforts were on my work machine - so Win XP Pro.

Things that took a bit of investigation, but now that I know how are easy (details where appropriate in later posts):

• formatting the first page so that everything on it is aligned vertically centered. (using frames)
• Creating unnumbered headings in a document that uses outline numbering
• changing cell colours in a table (not the whole table, just a cell - slightly counter-intuitive in that you have to go to 'Table' not 'Cell' to format this.)
• Getting the layout of my Table of Contents right - this merits some more play-time.
• Creating custom colours in the palette - Tools | Options | Openoffice.org | Colors
  

Things that surprised me in how easy they were:

• paste special - Ctrl+shift+v and then select your format - useful for pasting in Excel graphs (choose Bitmap) - actually, these came through flawlessly, which was also unexpected based on past experience (and they print nicely to boot!)
  
• creating a table from formatted data - I wanted to copy a table of data from excel, but pasting it straight in brings in all sorts of revolting styles, so instead I did a paste special | unformatted text and then just selected the text and hit the table button. Hey Presto! A perfectly formatted table of data.
  

One thing that marred the experience slightly:

• Early on in this, but enough into it to annoy me because I hadn't saved, Open Office Writer hung. Completely and irretrievably. I had to kill the process. I lost everything I'd done, and I was up to page 3 by this stage! At least it was all easier the 2nd time around for knowing what I was doing. But this behaviour is one I'm wary of!!!