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Editing a StoryLines document in OpenOffice

As explained in the section file export, StoryLines is designed to work smoothly with the excellent free office software, OpenOffice, which is an offshoot of Sun Microsystem's StarOffice.

If you export regularly to OpenOffice or another format, go to the report settings and check Invoke application after generating report, and your project will be presented to you for editing immediately you've exported it.

When you open a StoryLines document in OpenOffice, make sure the Paragraph Styles tool window (the 'Stylist') is showing. If not, hit F11 or click on the Format | Stylist command. Now select Custom Styles from the drop-down list at the bottom of the Stylist, and you should see a number of styles prefixed by SL (for StoryLines). You can double-click on one of these to apply that style to your text, and you can also use the drop-down list of recently-applied styles on the toolbar to do the same.

To create a convenient template to allow you to start editing documents from scratch, create or customize a report style to your satisfaction and then generate a dummy OpenOffice document. Open this in OpenOffice and save it as an OpenOffice.org Text Document Template in your OpenOffice installation directory under user/template.

To create a new file, click on New | Templates And Documents. In the Templates and Documents dialog that pops up, click on Templates, double-click on Default. Your templates should be listed, and you can now double-click on it to create a new document based on it.

If you have any more tips on using OpenOffice with StoryLines, please do send them in.