I’ve made a small contribution to the OpenOffice.org templates database. It’s an APA-style template (based on 5th edition manual) that I use for the papers I write in my graduate studies courses.
Most of the kinks are ironed out, I think. If you find any issues, please let me know. You can get the template here. (Moved here, March 2, 2010.)
The following are some tips for using the template.
Page breaks
None of the Heading styles contain automatic page breaks. Page breaks must be placed manually for each new section that requires a page break. Automatic page breaks seem to create page numbering and printing problems that may conflict with other APA style requirements.
Placeholder fields
Some placeholders are populated from the document properties. These are: document author, university name, instructor name, and short title.
Fonts
This template is set with ITC Franklin Gothic Std Book. The two forms are normal (Roman) and italic. Bold and bold italic are not required by the APA style. Users may substitute Arial or Helvetica as sans-serif fonts, or Times New Roman as a serif font.
Title page
The content on the title page is centred vertically through the use of a text frame. This frame expands or shrinks according to the number of text lines it contains. It will remain vertically centred as the number of text lines changes.
Page Styles
There are several key page styles in use. The Default page style applies to all inside pages, including Appendices. It places a header with short title and page number in the upper right of all pages. The Title Page page style applies only to the title page. It does not have a header nor a footer. The TOC page style is for the Table of Contents. It includes a footer with a centred, lower-case Roman numeral as the page number.
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I’m planning to post an update to the APA-style template sometime in the near future. Therefore, I’m now looking for suggestions for improvements that I may be able to roll into that update.
At the time of this writing, there have been 2,180 downloads of the APA-style template from the OpenOffice.org template repository — that’s about 80 downloads per day. I hope that means a lot of people have given it a go and may have something to say about the template.
I had trouble figuring out how to use and modify the Table of Contents
@matthew — The Table of Contents (TOC) is generated automatically. When you use the heading styles such as Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, or Heading 4, you are indicating an informational hierarchy that OpenOffice will use to generate the TOC.
The appearance of the TOC can be modified either through the Contents styles in “Styles and Formatting,” or by using the Insert > Indexes and Tables command. The latter isn’t exactly “intuitive,” but essentially you place your cursor in the existing TOC, got to the Indexes and Tables command, then make modifications in the multi-tabbed dialogue window that’s presented. It’s somewhat complex and takes some trial-and-error to figure out, but it may be what you’re looking for.
Today this template topped 10,000 downloads. I just needed to note that.
Orest- I am having trouble controlling the Heading-3. It wants to bold the entire paragraph and indent the entire paragraph. Thanks for your work on this template. I appreciate it.
Thanks for the feedback, Clark. If I understand your remark correctly, it sounds as though you’d like the Heading 3 style to behave as a character style instead of a paragraph style. In OO.o Writer, the character style and paragraph style are two of the different kinds of styles available in the Style & Formatting palette. Paragraph styles apply to the entire paragraph, as Heading 3 was designed to do, while Character styles apply to discrete blocks of text within a paragraph.
In order to get a Heading 3 style to behave as a character style, try the following. Highlight a block of text and style it as the Heading 3 style, as you normally might. Select an individual word in the heading 3-styled block. Open the Styles and Formatting palette (F11). In the palette choose the Character Styles Icon (with an ‘A’ on it). Still in the Styles palette, click the ‘New Style from Selection’ icon, next to the paint can. Name your new style. Depending how you work, I’d suggest appending “inline” to the style name, in order to differentiate it as a character style as opposed to the existing paragraph style. For example, you can keep “Heading 3″ as a paragraph style that styles the entire paragraph (though you may use it less frequently), and the new, in-line style you create can be called “Heading 3 inline.”
A quirk in how OO.o Writer displays styles is that it doesn’t seem to have a way to display character and paragraph styles at same time — it’s always one or the other, never both. You would need to be mindful of this when applying the styles — the new “Heading 3 inline” style will never appear in the same list as the existing paragraph styles. You’d have to switch to the Character Styles view in the Styles & Formatting palette in order to see Character Styles such as “Heading 3 inline”.
I hope that helps. Best of luck with your papers.
Orest- I believe that the inline heading for Heading 3 simply had the indentation commands reversed, that “before text” should be set to 0.0 and “first line” should be at 0.5 or whatever the appropriate indentation is. This gives me a Heading 3 inline for table of contents purposes but retains the paragraph formating of a body text paragraph. I am very grateful for your work you saved a lot of time and heartache at my house. Clark
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I’ve become dissatisfied with the OpenOffice.org templates web site as a place to host my templates for download, so I’ve made some changes.
My templates can now be downloaded from my own server at this download page.
Further information about this change can be found here.
Ever get the sense that APA is messed up? Too many changes that are useless. Continual changes with little stability. It’s nuts.