LibreOffice Writer: Parts of a window

The title bar is the same in LibreOffice regardless of the instance or application. It contains the documents full name (including the file extension), the name of the application, and controls for closing, minimizing, and expanding the window.

Below are images of how the titlebar looks in different operating system.

Windows

Mac OS X

Ubuntu

Linux Mint

Fedora

This is how the menus look in Mac OSX. They are above the document window, in the menu bar.

The menu bar has 10 drop-down menus.

LibreOffice Writer: The menus from OS-College on Vimeo.
File

This menu is common to all the LibreOffice applications. It allows you to do things like create a new document, save a document, export it to PDF, and print it.

Edit

This menu allows you to copy, paste, and cut selected text or objects, Find and Replace text and objects.

View

This menu allows you to view and hide toolbars, activate or hide gridlines, view or hide other elements, such as a gallery or the navigator.

Insert

This menu allows you to insert various objects, such as shapes images and OLE.

Format

This allows you to format text, paragraph, a page, images, and other objects.

Styles

This allows you to choose from common styles. I also allows you to update and add styles.

Table

This allows you to create a table, modify a current table, and convert a table to text.

Tools

This gives you access to dictionaries, thesauri, and other spelling and grammar features and tools.

Window

This lists the open LibreOffice documents, including untitled ones.

Help

This gives you access to the various help topics and information about LibreOffice.

The bar can either be part of the window or it can be in a menu bar that is separate from the window but a normal feature in the particular operating system. This is true if LibreOffice is running on Mac OS X or Ubunutu.

The status bar is on the bottom of each Writer window. It has several divisions of controls that you can adjust.

Page number in document

This tells you the total number of pages in a document and which page number you are on.

Word and character count

This tells you how many words and characters are in your document. It also tells you how many words and characters are in a selection.

Page style

This typically shows default style. However, if you have created a custom style, it will show this.

Text language

This will show the language the spelling and grammar tools a paragraph is set to.

Insert/overwrite mode

Insert mode is the normal state. It is blank when it is in this mode. This adds the new characters to the line where the cursor is located as you type them, moving any text to the right of the cursor farther right. Overwrite mode will replace the character or space immediately to the right of the cursor with the character you type.

Standard selection

Clicking this opens a menu. The menu has four choices.

• Standard selection: Click in the text where you want to position the cursor; click
  in a cell to make it the active cell. Any other selection is then deselected. This allows you to select text by holding down the left mouse button and dragging it until the cursor passes over all the characters you want to include in theselection. This is the normal wayof selecting.
• Extending selection: Click in the text where you want to position the cursor; click in a cell to make it the active cell. Any other selection is then deselected. This allows you to add to the current selection. After using Standard or another selection method. Then select this and use the process in Stand selection to add more text to the selection. The newly selected text needs to be adjacent to the previously selected text. If you select text that is not adjacent, the text that is between the newly selected text and the previously selected text also will be selected.
• Adding selection: A new selection is added to an existing selection. The result is a multiple selection. This is very similar to Extending selection. However, the text does not need to be adjacent.
• Block selection: A block of text can be selected. This will treat text as if it is in a table and cells, even if the selection is not in a table. Hold down the left mouse button and select half the text in a line then drag the mouse down until text in the line below it is selected. In other selection methods the entire text in line 1 would be selected. In this method, the second half of line 1 would remain unselected.

Document status

This will give you information about whether the document has been saved or not. A red asterisk indicates that it has not been saved since changes have been made to a document. A check mark indicates that the recent changes in a document have been saved.

Digital signature

Some documents can be signed digitally, and some organizations and government agencies require them to be signed. This section gives information on whether or not the document has been signed and how.

Object information

Section or object information. When the cursor is in a section, heading, or list item, or when an object (such as a picture or table) is selected, information about that item appears in this field. Double-clicking in this area opens a relevant dialog. If a normal paragraph is selected, the area will be blank.

Page view

This has three options: Single-page, Multiple-page view, and Book view.

Zoom

This allows you to zoom in and out of a document. The closest you can zoom in up to 600 percent, and it can zoom out up to 20 percent. The percentage is shown to the right of the zoom bar.