OOo Off the Wall: Fielding Questions, Part 1 - The Basics
Wednesday, February 02 2005 @ 05:00 AM EST Contributed by: glosser
The Linux Journal presents this tutorial about OpenOffice fields.
Fields aren't supposed to mess up your documents and make you pull out your hair--learn when fields are useful and how to use them.
Many OpenOffice.org users have a love-hate relationship with fields. On the one hand, they hardly can avoid using them. Items such as page numbers and bullet lists use fields automatically to eliminate corruption while editing. On the other hand, fields can be difficult to grasp. More than one new user has been alarmed by the gray backgrounds used by default to display fields in Writer and needed to be reassured that the backgrounds don't print. More experienced users may be nervous because fields are associated with difficult concepts, such as conditions, data sources and mail merges. And this nervousness is not reduced by the help system, which often fails to explain these concepts at a beginner's level.
In fact, even the Fields window itself can be puzzling. For example, although you obviously can add the fields on the Database tab to a document, why and when would you want to do so? Furthermore, the arrangement of fields on the tabs of the Fields window is not as logical or as consistent as it could be.
This article is the first of a series that aims to demystify fields so that you use them to enhance your work. In this article, we start with the basics of fields, explaining how to use them and the simplest versions of them, user fields and document information.
