On 08/27/09 02:54, Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
Gary Schnabl wrote:
Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
This is a classic example of how users won't find what they need in
the help or the user guides if they don't know what to look for, or
are looking for the wrong thing.
This person probably came from Word, where sections are used in the
way page styles are in Writer, and hasn't learned the difference (a
common problem), so he needs to study the info that Uwe points to in
his note, plus other info on page styles.
I think there is a bit in the user guide about the Word-Writer
differences regarding sections and page styles, but it may need
cross-referencing from other places, especially on the wiki.
I'll add this to my to-do list of improvements to the Writer Guide.
I'm getting quite a collection, while doing some other work.
--Jean
True, sections are used in Word for page formatting--those segments
having multi-columns, perhaps, or having the sections start at a left
or right page. OOo would use custom page styles for that, and Adobe
FrameMaker would use master-page and body-page formatting to achieve
their page formatting. In addition, FrameMaker uses a flow concept,
where more than one flow of page formatting exists--such as used in
magazines where articles are interrupted and continued again, further
into the document.
It would be fairly difficult to cover much of those specialized page
formatting techniques in any detail in a
beginning-to-intermediate-level user guide. Specific tutorials or
in-depth books usually cover those topics.
I don't think more detail than is already there is necessary, but what
people do
need is to be able to find the info they need. If they are thinking in
terms of
Word's "sections", they may not discover that what they want is "page
styles" --
especially since Writer has something called "sections" that are for a
different
purpose. From my reading, this is a very common topic of confusion for
former
Word users. I have just added brief notes on this to some wiki pages.
This is a good example of the things I'd like to see summarised on a
wiki page for Word users. Similar pages for users of FrameMaker, Word
Perfect, and other progams would be good, too. All of that, of course,
depends on contributions from people who know those programs. (Note to
self: add need for these pointer pages to the list of topics on one of
the pages for contributors.)
--Jean
I'll add a pair of "Microsoft Word: Sections -- OOo: Page Styles" to the
Help at index "Microsoft Office;feature comparisons".
Did not know Word so good that I recognized that this may be a problem
for some users.
Uwe
--
u...@openoffice.org - Technical Writer
StarOffice - Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Hamburg, Germany
http://documentation.openoffice.org/
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation
http://blogs.sun.com/oootnt
http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum
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