Tips for illustrated books and comics in Apache Openoffice

Apache Openoffice was not designed for any useful purpose.  If you know what's good for you, you should only use it to do word processing.
I don't know what's good for me, so I keep punishing myself and learning more frustrating things about the program:
1.  Your formatting does not port to other computers that have Openoffice.  I tried.  Any formatting I put in there was lost when I opened it on the other computer.  What looks perfect on my XP computer comes out complete garbage on my Windows 7 computer, even though it's been reformatted to run as XP.
2.  Do not ever put an illustration in the page number box!  Openoffice is so retarded that it will paste the same damn image file on every page in your book.  It will make you think the program is broken and you will have to restart to fix the problem.  Make sure the cursor is on the middle of a page before pasting!
A big hint is the fact that when you double click the .jpg, it doesn't give you anchor positioning data.  It's all grayed out.  Oh.  Wait.  If you've already pasted it in the box for the numbering, it's too late for that information to be of any use.  You've got forty seven hundred copies of the same picture.
Yeah.  Sure.  Like I'd be stupid enough to put that many pictures in such a feeble excuse for a layout program.
3.  Save often.  Find a good book to read while it's saving, which happens every couple minutes, even if you don't want it to.  I learned this the hard way.  Nothing is worse than making mistake #2 and not doing #3 before closing it out.  It takes forever to save anything, so you'll want a good book to read.
I guess there's some setting you can use for preventing it from saving, but I think you have to give it a time limit, so you can't make it stop autosaving cold turkey, it has to be told, "no, wait fifteen minutes", and I think that's as far as you can set it.  It's probably for the best, because of all the times it can @%&# up, but on the other hand, if you @$#& up, there is no forgiveness, you will be stuck with your mistake forever.

(More Under Cut)

4.  Images Don't Automatically Update.  Watch out!  This is tricky!  You may think that you've fixed all the bad images in your project, but when you go to print it, it's like the program laid a big turd on the paper and laughed at you.
Word to the wise:  if you want to update any picture on the document, delete it and paste it back in.  There is no other way to do this!
5.  There is no "send to background".  Illustrator lets you move stuff around.  In Openoffice, you have to delete a picture and post it again to put it up front.
6.  Anchor to page, not paragraph!  Where'd that damn .jpg file go?  Oh, that's right.  I anchored it to the paragraph like a dumb-dumb, so it created an entire blank page for the printer to waste paper on. 
Why is that picture being overlapped by the other one?  Because the other one is linked to paragraph, and you just deleted the picture that used to keep it in place.  That's why I'm out another ten bucks at Kinkos.  (Smacks face).
7.  Paragraph and Page coordinates exist in different universes.  This is incredibly idiotic, but location 5.88X6.57 exists in one plane when you pick Paragraph Anchor, and it exists in an entirely separate world when you pick the same exact location in Page Anchor.  In other words, if you choose Paragraph Anchor and select -0.5 or something as the location, it will default to 0 and slap the picture somewhere off to the opposite side, because it's stupid.  Select paragraph, and it will go on the edge like you originally wanted it to go.
8.  You have to drag an image far, far up into the previous page in order to make it stay on the page and not bounce back into the following page.  The previous page's top edge cannot be visible, or it will rubber band back to the other page.  This won't make sense unless you have the program and try it.  The program tells you "Hey!  I don't want that picture up on that blank page, I want it down here, so you can waste a lot more paper."  So you've got to force it to scroll back and let it know who's boss.  What I have gained from this experience is that Openoffice is the world's most accurate marriage simulator.
9.  Navigate the pages like Grandma Moses, or you'll be sorry.  No joke.  I made the mistake of forcing the navigator to skip down to the last page in my document, rolling my mouse bar and all that, and all but a quarter of the images disappeared.  I had to place them all back in, one by one, doubling the time it should have taken.  You can save until you're blue in the face, and close and open the file again, but those images will be permanently gone, no matter what you do.  There is no excuse why a program should ever be this inefficient.
10.  Write down every last detail that you see in the image boxes, anchor position, etc.  See note #9.  It will save time.  Even though you will not have your hair when you are done, at least you didn't blow your brains out all over the screen.
11.  Bleed does not exist for PDF.  Instead, the program will cut everything off, leaving a crisp, clean, uninteresting white margin.  Word to the wise.
12.  Holding shift and pressing page down will not highlight multiple pages of text.  Only holding shift and pushing the down arrow will highlight multiple pages of text, and that's only if there isn't a table in the way.  Then you can only delete what is before the table.
13.  Save your file with a different name than the PDF, or the odt will be lost forever.  I never saved the backup on my other computer, because of item 1, so I have very little hair left on my head, and I am missing a thumb because I bit it off in frustration.
14.  You're never done.  Even when you think it's good, once you try to print or export something, all the errors come out in their full glory.  If the heart is deceitful above all others, Openoffice is deceitfulness cubed.