Electricmonk

Ferry Boender

Programmer, DevOpper, Open Source enthusiast.

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OpenOffice Writer: Refer to section

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

When writing a document, you’ll probably want to refer to another section in the document. For instance: “See chapter 5 for more information”. However, when you insert a new chapter before chapter 5, you’ll have to read through your entire document and update every mentioning of “Chapter 5” to “Chapter 6”. Tedious and prone to error. But you don’t have to do it by hand! There’s a way in OpenOffice Writer to refer to another chapter so that when the document changes, you can easily update all references:

  1. Insert a bookmark in the document by using Insert → Bookmark at the position in the document you want to refer too. Enter a name for the bookmark and press Ok.
  2. Now, to refer to the position where you created the bookmark from another part of your document, go to that part and choose Insert → Cross-reference. Choose ‘Bookmarks‘ under Title and the name of the recently created bookmark under Selection. Under Format, you can choose how you’d like the reference to look. ‘Page’ will insert the page number of the bookmark at the current position, ‘Chapter’ will show the chapter number, etc.
  3. Press ‘Insert‘ and then ‘Close

A reference to the bookmark will now be inserted at the current location. The text that will be displayed depends on what you chose under Format.

If changes in your document occur that have an impact on what’s displayed at the reference, you can update all references by choosing Tools → Update → Update All.

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