2011-09-21

Normal.dot in OpenOffice or LibreOffice

Some time ago I was asked where the normal.dot is in Open Office and I was stuck. I don't open the writer and write. I have copied all my templates to ~/Templates. The first action I take when I want to create a new document is to go in the folder where I want to save it, click the right mouse-button, hover on "Create new document" and choose the template of my choice. That way I neither have to think about what type of document (text, graphic, spreadsheet) my template needs to be.

However, most people are just used to just firing up MS Word or if they are on Windows with Open Office they miss the nice template folder and to create a new document from a template within Open Office for me is definitely too many clicks away (3 clicks and 2 double-clicks).

When I was asked for the "normal.dot" I searched a lot and I searched the internet to finally find out, that it is described very well in the Open Office help:

To Create a Default Template
  1. Create a document and the content and formatting styles that you want. 
  2. Choose File - Templates - Save.
  3. In the New Template box, type a name for the new template
  4. In the Categories list, select "My Templates", and then click OK.
  5. Choose File - Templates - Organize.
  6. In the Templates list, double-click the "My Templates" folder.
  7. Right-click the template that you created, and choose Set as Default Template.
  8. Click Close.
It's the same in LibreOffice by the way.

Related posts: Default paper size in Open Office, Firefox change default page format, Locale configuration on Ubuntu.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

thank you, this war very helpful