New to Open Office

I'm not too familiar with OO, but I would guess this is a visual indication to show the margins, header, footer, and main text area. The markings should go away when you print. Maybe there is an options in the settings to turn those off.

-cb

Not sure why you're being forced to move from Office to OO - licensing allows you to usually re-install at least once or twice as long as you have the license key from your original purchase.

That said, have you tried Google for your issue?

https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=19828

[FONT=&quot]This is the text boundaries box, and it shows the limits of the text area on the page. It doesn't print, it is for on-screen use only.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]To turn it off, go to View and then uncheck Text Boundaries.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]...

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As Jason and cbenoi said, it's a text boundary thing. You may notice them if you use certain more advanced paragraphing features or layout stuff. It's a way of noting where you have a non-text mark or other field boundary. In this case, it's the field that automatically fills with your page number.

As above, you should be able to turn this off, though it's there for a reason and there have been times, when I'm doing manuscript formatting, that I enjoy being able to see the formatting fields so I can see if I've left anything odd through the MS. (Though I do sometimes turn the feature on and off, as I also don't love having them when writing.)

ETA: You can do this without even opening the main options menu. Under "View", de-select "Text Boundaries" and "Non-Printing characters". For future reference, OO has a very good options menu under Tools-->Options.

I think the best time to switch from Office to OO was around 2003-2005 when they had roughly similar interfaces for a while--but OO ran better. Now LibreOffice has branched off, with its own quirks, and Word's interface went all sparkly around 2007, IMO for the worse, but it's a bit of a different feel now.

The good news is OO and Libre are both very customizable. IMO, you're not losing a whole lot switching from Word to one of the open-source alternatives, which are also more ethical, if that's your jam.

If you want more distraction-free writing, there are some alternatives specially designed for that, including IA Writer and Wordpress' composition tools. I thinK Scrivener might have that option, too, but I haven't used it.

Props to VeryBigBeard here - Libre is by far the new and improved version of OO as I think the latter isn't getting anywhere near the R&D anymore that it used to. It's what I use on my tablet for work stuff when I don't want to open my laptop for heavy lifting.

When I am writing personal stuff (like the stuff I work on for submission here, and personal growth kinda exercises), I am a big fan of Scrivener (and AW has an affiliate link for it too) because you can install it in two places (desktop and laptop, desktop and iPad, etc.) and sync files using a cloud solution like Dropbox, Box, or whatever. It's distraction free writing at it's best imho - but a larger footprint item like Libre would be better for more heavy lifting. The only reason I still use Office apps is because of my employer. Otherwise, I'd be open sourced all the way (and Scrivener...)

One catch though is even though Open Office (and Libre Office) can produce file compatible Word docs, some advanced formatting does not pass through correctly between the two. It's not an issue as long as you use Open Office exclusively, but don't expect to be able to use both Open Office and MS Word on the same document.

Al X. said:

One catch though is even though Open Office (and Libre Office) can produce file compatible Word docs, some advanced formatting does not pass through correctly between the two. It's not an issue as long as you use Open Office exclusively, but don't expect to be able to use both Open Office and MS Word on the same document.

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This is, by and large, no longer the case.

When .docx first started being used, there were some problems because .docx was initially a proprietary format and it uses XML. Creating that difficulty was very likely Microsoft's intent as it gave them a leg-up in capability and locked users off from older word processors like the Pages and WordPerfect (RIP, WP...). But .docx has become increasingly standardized now. LO and OO can both open and save into that format, among others.

At the very advanced end of Word (or LO's) layout features, you can run into conversion problems. But this is true of any layout program, and mostly because of how the layout features work. In my view, if you're doing any serious layout work, you should probably be using InDesign or one of its alternatives rather than a word processor anyway. For most of the more casual stuff, there usually aren't conversion problems anymore. It doesn't take the open-source community long to adapt to those features.

VeryBigBeard said:

In my view, if you're doing any serious layout work, you should probably be using InDesign or one of its alternatives rather than a word processor anyway. For most of the more casual stuff, there usually aren't conversion problems anymore. It doesn't take the open-source community long to adapt to those features.

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Agreed.

I've had minor issues with typography (an installed font not being matched) or tiny oddities with line spacing in footnotes, etc. But these are minor, cosmetic issues and easily fixed.