If you open an existing document, it is saved by default in its original format. Thus, if you receive an MS Office file from a colleague and edit it, you get an MS Office file in return. That’s usually what you want, so you can exchange documents with everyone and not force your word processing choice on them (as new versions of MS Office itself are wont to do as a form of planned obsolescence).

Sometimes, however, you need to save a document in a different format; we describe some of those situations in Section 7.2.1. The most common reason to change the file type is when you create a new StarWriter document and want to save it in MS Word format. By default, new documents are saved in StarWriter’s native format (although that default is easy to change; we show you how later). The formats supported by StarWriter are listed in Table 7-2. To choose a new file type, select File → Save As to open the Save As window. Here, you can make the appropriate selections and click the Save button.

Note that most of the file types in Table 7-2 are available as a save option in the Save As window. (See Figure 7-2.)

You can hide any of the toolbars (except Main menu) by unchecking their names in the top half of the context menu that opens when you right-click in the empty space within any of the toolbars. (See Figure 7-4.)

Figure 7-4. The context menu for configuring toolbars

You can further rearrange elements and redesign toolbars to your personal preference by choosing any of the other four choices in the bottom half of the contextual menu:

Changes made using these commands apply to the specific toolbar on which you right-clicked to call the context menu.

When most word processor users think of document formatting options or styles, they think of bold, italic, underlining, fonts, font sizes, indentations, and other visible effects on text. If you’re experienced with word processing, you know to look on the Object bar for the basic character formatting buttons, and you know these buttons can help you execute quick formatting changes in one click.

Figure 7-6 illustrates the available buttons for creating direct effects, which include such fancy changes as coloring text and creating bulleted or numbered lists. In addition to font-change Object bar buttons such as B, I, and U, you can use familiar keystroke combinations (Ctrl-B, Ctrl-I, and Ctrl-U) after selecting text that you wish to change.

Figure 7-5. The formatting buttons on the Object Bar

When you apply manual formatting changes, whether from the Object bar buttons or the Format drop-down menu (Figure 7-7, StarWriter changes the format of the whole word when the cursor is simply located somewhere within the word at the time you invoke the change. There’s no need to highlight the whole word. This saves extraneous mouse maneuvers or keystrokes. Direct changes can be made one at a time to sequences of characters or to whole paragraphs.

Figure 7-6. The Format drop-down on the Main menu

Figure 7-7. The Character window

Figure 7-8. Paragraph window

Unlike characters and paragraphs, invoking page format control through Format → Page . . . (Figure 7-10 lands you in the realm of general Styles, which we cover later. To create a page format or style that you can reuse repeatedly, see Section 7.2.3.6

Figure 7-9. Page window

Headers and footers are the textual (or other) content that you want to repeat at either the top (header) or bottom (footer) of every page of a document or section. Before you fill in any information, headers and footers appear as empty banners or frames at the top and bottom (respectively) of each page.

To insert a header, go to the Main menu, select Insert → Header and check Default in the drop-down menu. This opens a header frame into the current document where you can type or enter the appropriate content that appears at the top of every page of the document.

Inserting a footer is the same as inserting a header, but select Insert → Footers and check Default.

To change headers or footers in the middle of a document, see the section Section 7.2.3.8

Most documents show page numbers in a header or footer. To generate automatic page numbers, insert a header or footer (depending on where you intend the page number to go, at either the top or bottom of each page) and place the cursor inside the live header or footer frame by clicking once there. Then go to the Main menu and select Insert → Fields. This invokes a drop-down menu with the following choices:

Selecting the Page Number choice inserts the page number automatically at the location of the cursor. (See Figure 7-10.)

Figure 7-10. Inserting page numbers

Sometimes it’s appropriate to create page numbering in a header or footer that states the page number as well as the total number of pages in the document. Such a format would read “Page 16 of 96,” for example. In this case, place the cursor in the target location in the header or footer and type Page followed by a space, insert Page Number as shown above, type of followed by a space, and insert Page Count from the same drop-down menu.

To change or restart page numbering at a certain point in a document, see the section Section 7.2.3.7

Sometimes it’s useful to have a document’s filename, or even the whole path with slashes, entered into a header or footer. This helps identify—especially in the document’s printed form—the location of the digital source of the document for subsequent retrieval.

To insert a filename, first insert a footer as described earlier.

Then press Ctrl-F2. Alternatively, place the cursor in the footer, select Insert → Fields, and choose Other in the drop-down menu. This invokes the Fields window.

Next, in the Document tab, in the Type column, click on File name. This will invoke the Format column on the right side of the Fields window.

Finally, click on Path/File name (or any desirable variation offered) and click the Insert button at the bottom of the Fields window.

A template is a preformatted file or document that is used as the basis for creating other similarly formatted documents. Using a template saves the effort of formatting documents the same way over and over again. What we call “Templates” in context of StarWriter is the whole tool set for storing and managing templates, as well as creating new documents from template files.

Template files are linked to the documents that are created with them. It may help to imagine the template file, or the source file, as the “parent” and the derived document as the “child.” Parent-to-child linkage is one of the principal benefits of using Templates. What’s powerful is when you have a large number of “child” documents in your Documents folder, for example, you have the ability to update the formatting of all those files in one stroke by altering the formatting of the “parent” template file.

We cover the Templates tool-set in the section Section 7.2.4

Styles refers to the strong formatting features of StarWriter that permit you to maintain a growing catalogue of stock and custom compound formats for characters, paragraphs, and pages that you can use over and over across all your documents. Like Templates, Styles brings power to your desktop repertoire by helping you eliminate repetitive tasks.

In one example, a style applied throughout a document—a certain type of heading for instance—can be altered in one stroke when you modify that particular style in your Styles Catalog. The modification to the style will ripple through your document, saving the repetitive tagging of possibly many instances of that heading. Such features are most useful with large and heavily formatted documents such as chapter works, technical documentation, research reports, and white papers.

We cover Styles in the section Section 7.2.3