Welcome to the Spoken tutorial on LibreOffice Writer- Creating Newsletters with Multiple Columns.
In this tutorial we will learn how to create newsletters in LibreOffice Writer and a few operations that can be performed on them.
Here we are using GNU/Linux as our operating system and LibreOffice Suite version 3.3.4.
A newsletter is used as a publication, which gets circulated out to its subscribers in a regular time interval. For example - a periodical, a pamphlet and many more.
It has multiple columns as sections and makes it easier for the reader to go through different articles in these sections.
Using LibreOffice Writer one can create newsletters which make reading of articles much easier and faster.
Lets open a new text document by clicking on File, New and Text Document option.
Save this document with filename Newsletter.
So we have a new text document named Newsletter.
Now lets insert columns into our document.
To do so, first click on the Format button in the menu bar and then click on Columns.
A dialog box appears with various options -
selecting the number of columns you want,
setting the width and spacing of these columns
as well as setting the various properties of the separator lines.
We will select two columns for the newsletter document by increasing the column field value to 2.
The five icons besides the column field show you the preview of the various formats available.
So lets click on the second format.
Lets keep all the other values which define the property of the columns as default.
And click on the OK button.
You see that 2 columns get displayed in the text area.
Let us write an article in our first column.
We will give its heading as Nature in bold text with font size 15.
And below that we will write an article on it.
You see that the cursor automatically goes to the next column after it reaches the end of the first column.
You can even insert a picture in the column and resize it so that it fits into the column.
Now after leaving out some spaces you can write another article into the column.
So we will first give it a heading as Sports in bold text with font size 15 and below that we will write an article on it.
So you see - columns make it easier for the reader to go through multiple articles.
Let us delete some sentences so that our article fits in the first column only.
Then, to access the further columns click on the Insert button and then click on Manual Break.
In the dialog box which appears, click on the Column break button and then click on the OK button.
You see that the cursor comes on the next column automatically.
So you can start writing another article in this column.
All the formatting options like
Align left, Align right, adding Background Color to the text,
Highlighting the text and many other features
can be added to the text to make it attractive.
For example, we select the portion of the text to which we want to apply a background color.
Now click on the Background Color icon in the toolbar and then click on Green 4.
We see that the background color of the selected text changes to light green.
Like wise you can give different background colors to different parts of the text.
You can even add banners to the newsletter by first clicking on the Text option in the drawing toolbar.
Now place the textbox anywhere in the document where there is no written text.
Inside the textbox you can write any text which will act as a banner or ads.
So let us type some text like This is a newsletter.
You can even add effects to this text.
For example, first right click on the text and then click on the Text option in the menu.
A dialog box appears which has tabs namely Text and Text Animation.
Click on the Text Animation tab.
In the Effects field under this tab there are various options.
In order to blink the text in the newsletter, we click on the Blink option
And finally click on the OK button.
We see that the text This is a newsletter constantly blinks in the document.
Similarly, various such effects and graphics can be given to the text.
Now for writing a new article on the next page, you need to first click on the Insert button
And then click on the Manual Break option.
In the dialog box which appears, click on the Page break button.
And finally click on the OK button.
You see that the cursor comes on the next page.
This page contains the same column format as on the previous page.
For maintaining a word count in your article, first select a portion of your text or the entire document.
Now click on the Tools option in the menu bar.
Now click on the Word Count option in the dropdown box.
A dialog box appears which shows you the word count of current selection and the whole document as well.
It also shows the total count of characters in your entire document as well as in the selected text.
The spell check can be done automatically while writing the document.
Click on the AutoSpellcheck icon in the toolbar.
Now while writing the article, if there are any spelling mistakes, then Writer automatically shows them by underlining the word with a red line.
For example, when we write the word Cat as C -A- A -T and press the space-bar, we see that a red line is displayed below it.
But when we correct the word, the red line disappears.
Hence,we see that all the formatting options discussed in the previous tutorials can be applied in newsletters, too.
This brings us to the end of this spoken tutorial on LibreOffice Writer.
To summarise, we learned about how to Create Newsletters in LibreOffice Writer and few operations which can be performed on them.
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