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)
