[Solved] Wrap and spacing

[Bramblewood]

I am using OpenOffice 4.1.10 and have been using OpenOffice for more than fifteen years and wouldn't use anything else. I have tried everything I can think of to get my spreadsheet to print properly. I have created an autobiography of my life in about 500 paragraphs, each paragraph being one cell. I have created a cell with each new memory, then when I have the time and inclination, expand the cell to create the finished paragraph. I have columns which I am able to sort for year and decade and for the order I wish to print them. I want to print the whole spreadsheet at once and sorted by my columns. I also want to leave one blank line between each paragraph. I cannot limit the length of each cell to the paper width even though I have word-wrapped each cell. I cannot find any solution in the HELP section. Am I doing something wrong? Please help. If it helps, I am prepared to move the spreadsheet information to the Writer if necessary to print although I don't really want to do this. I don't know how to do that either. Thank you.

[FJCC]

I strongly suspect that this would be handled better in Writer but I am having trouble understanding how the document is laid out. Can you prepare a simple example showing how the spreadsheet is organized? It should have columns similar to the real document but the text can be nonsense or random snippets. To upload a file, click Post Reply and look for the Upload Attachment tab just below the box where you type a response.

[Bill]

From my testing using Page Preview, if the cell is wider that the page print area, then the text will flow into the page margin even if it is word wrapped. Adjusting the column width should solve that part, but the space between paragraphs is determined by the row height of the cells. As far as I know, there is no way to make the spacing between paragraphs always exactly one blank line. You might get better results by saving a copy as a CSV file and inserting the CSV file into a Writer document. Note that CSV files will only have the first sheet of the spreadsheet.

[Bramblewood]

0 1 AN ORDINARY LIFE LIVED EXTRAORDINARILY
0 2 LEGEND Column A number is order of timeline. Column B number is decade. Column C = sort within decade Column D a=completed. x=incomplete. Y=Information and 25,26, order of placement. P=personal information, m=Mom's info. D=Dad info, E=Ed info. A means the story is complete. X means that it still needs to be written. – it is only a note to remember. Y means that it is general and does not have a specific time.
0 3 I am sure that there are many more stories I could tell you but I think that I will save them for the book. I am not sure of many of the dates without checking back in my journals so they may be off by a year especially if there is a ? beside them. Also note that most of this treaste was written more than 50 years after the event and I was more than 70 years old. Memories fade or are constantly being modified.
0 4 a I was born at Toronto Western Hospital at 12:15 pm on Tuesday 4 June 1946. My mother stayed in the hospital for a week. I am more than 2 billion, 300 million seconds old. That is 900 months. I am a Gemini. I was about a month late according to my mother. My first word was at about 10 months. It was 'light'. My father arranged a giant hanging poster about twenty feet long that said, “Welcome home Bruce”.
1 4 a Two weeks after I was born, my parents took me camping to Fenelon Falls in central Ontario. We did that for a couple of years before they bought the land for the cottage on Wagner's Lake.

[Bill]

Please upload a real spreadsheet document instead of a description. We have no way of knowing what settings you are using in documents based on content descriptions. Without the settings, we can only guess what you have done that may be causing a problem.

[Bramblewood]

This is the first part of the file. There are about 500 paragraphs in this complete file. I also have a file of more than 30,000 lines with quotes from famous people that I would like to print out as well. it has the same problems. I have several other files done the same way. I find it much easier to sort and add to in Calc than in Writer so have been using Calc for the last 20 plus years. I also have a copy of WordPerfect that some of the original files were created on. Would I be better to dump the Calc file back into WordPerfect and print it out that way? I much prefer Open Office. Thank you for your help.

[FJCC]

The attached file is what I get if I select all of the occupied cells in the Calc document and paste them into a Writer document. I used Edit -> Paste Special -> Unformatted Text and I then selected all of the text in the Writer document and selected the menu Table -> Convert -> Text To Table. I kept all of the default settings in the dialog except I turned off Equal Width For All Columns. The Writer table can be sorted with the menu Table -> Sort.
Would this kind of document work for you?

[Bill]

1. Word wrap is not enabled in the sample file.
2. Column E is 8.68" wide but the page is only 8.5" wide. Change column E width to 6" or less so all columns will fit on the page.
3. Row height is set to .26", so only one line of text will be displayed. Change the row height setting to "Optimal Row Height".

[Bramblewood]

Thanks. I'll try this.