I am frustrated over the fact that for some idiotic reason, when I want to bullet something, Writer bullets both my sentences and line spaces between them. This doesn't occur in Word. My coworkers complain about this everyday!

How can I bullet JUST the sentences BUT NOT the line spaces between the sentences? Simple.

Turn on the "Non-printing characters" from the view menu or CTRL+F10, and look for the end of line marker. If the lines are soft wrapped, then only the first line should have a bullet. If there is an end of paragraph or hard wrap, then it will bullet every line.

If you want to put a blank line between two bulleted sentences, then to get rid of the bullet on the blank line, put the cursor to the right of the bullet, and press backspace once.

However after saying all that, you must remember that the various versions of M$ Word have there own bugs, and some will put the bullets back on the blank lines! I never send people Word documents unless I want them to edit them, I now always send PDF's. M$ Word is S**T!!!!

OO 2.4:

If you have blank lines that have bullets that you do not want, click on the line and then click the bullet icon. The bullet will be removed.
As far as I remember, word is equally quirky in its behaviour.

With all due respect, what you suggesed is extremely counter-intuitive. How is it productive to go back to each blank line and get rid of each bullet of each blank line? This is NOT what a word processor is supposed to do. It's supposed to do this work for you, not make you do it yourself. This "tip" is of no use because I got to go back to about 200 lines and remove the bullets from those blank lines, being careful not to remove bullets from the sentences in my doc. This is HIGHLY tedious. Out of curiosity, why doesn't Word make this same careless error?

If you guys don't agree that in this sense Word is better than Writer, then you leave much to be desired. And again, I'm saying this out of respect.

I godamn can't believe that the developers of open office Writer overlooked this very basic and important element in Writer. Why would they intentionally make certain that blank lines get bulleted?

FOR THE GODDAMN LAST TIME... NO WORD PROCESSOR IS SUPPOSED TO INSERT BULLETS IN BLANK LINES!!!

Any ideas on how to bullet sentences, and not the spaces in between them?

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I think you are misunderstanding what is happening.

If you have a bulletted or numbered list, and a blank line is inserted anywhere within the list using th Enter key, then the word processor inserts a new number and renumbers the following lines. This is because it thinks you are going to write a new bullet point. If you then put in another blank line by pressing Enter, the number dissapears.

It's supposed to work like that, and I have just tested 4 different word processors and they all work the same - Word 2000, & OpenOffice 2.4.1 on Windows 2000 Professional, and OpenOffice, KOffice & AbiWord on Linux. As far as I can remember, AppleWorks, ClarisWorks & WordPerfect used to do the same.

However they do different things if you put blank lines in un-bulleted text which you then highlight and bullet. From my own experience, working with documents with numbered lists in OpenOffice is easier than Word, but converting to Word 2000, 2003 or 2007 can produce different results, and this seems to be down to the version of Word. I have had lists in OpenOffice with un-numbered blank lines between numbered items completely wrecked when converting, so now if it is important for a document to be accessed in Word, I have to do my formatting in OpenOffice on Windows, so I can do a side by side comparison with Word. Even then I have sent documents out for editing in Word 2000 format, and had them come back from someone using Word 2007 with all the numbering and spacing broken.

This is never going to have a simple fix, though the guys at Sun who are doing most of the work on
importing and exporting between OpenOffice and MSOffice have done a great job with no help from Microsoft.

I try to not put blank lines in lists, but rather use the line spacing setting on the Indents and Sapcing tab. I usually make a version of the Text Boy style and call it List Body to format lists, so I have more control.

The bottom line is that the suites have different ways of doing things, and I prefer OpenOffice to MSOffice, but that's after 30 years of working with word processors, and frankly there isn't a best way to do this, and the problem you are having is no with OpenOffice, but with the way Word interprets your formatting.

The simple answer is NEVER put blank lines in lists, use the Line Spacing function instead.

WRONG!!! It's NOT supposed to work like that. WordPerfect DOES NOT do the same mistake as OpenOffice does. I really don't know where you got this idea.

When you place spaces in between lines of text, the word processor is supposed to be smart enough to know NOT to bullet the spaces. If this doens't bother you, then you're complacent.

That's not true! If the guys at Sun "have done a great job" with OpenOffice then why am I and others complaining about it? Also, programming OpenOffice to avoid bulleting line spaces in a series of sentences isn't rocket science. If the guys at Sun are soooo smart, they should've known this the day they were born and corrected this simple to solve problem.

Well, I have to put blank lines in my list of text.

The problem I am having IS with OpenOffice. How did you arrive at the idea of me using Word since nowhere in my thread did I ever mention that I use Word? Also, I've tried using different file types to see it the problem helps. It doesn't. This is a problem that is universal in all file types within OpenOffice.

Again, you may not use blank lines in your lists, but most of us do, including myself! As a matter of fact, all of the people I know at work use spaces in their lists.

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Wow. You are extremely angry about word processing. I don't think I've ever seen anyone so furious about a word processor, let alone bulleted lines!

Anyway, how did you put the blank lines in there? I know that, on Word, if you have a bulleted line and hit enter, the next line will also be bulleted. Hitting enter again will give you a blank line with no bullet, but you will then have to go back and manually enter a bullet.

My guess is that you did it by entering a line, hitting enter twice and then entering another line? You then went back, selected all and pressed the bullet button?

What you could do is to play around with the spacing in Format-->Paragraph. Make the spacing after the paragraph give you the required gap, then go back and bullet it. And having written a stack of documentation recently, I can confirm that Word does do the same thing.

Wow. You seem extremely observant about other people. I guess it's because of people like me who strive for improvement that differentiates from people like you who'd rather sit twiddling your thumbs and complacent.

What I do is create my list of sentences, highlight the list, and bullet them throught the bullets feature. But, unfortunately, the line spaces between the list also get bulleted.

That SEEMS to work. What I do is I highlight the lines, go to Paragraph, choose Double Space, then bullet. The lines in the list get bulleted except for the spaces between them. But, it'd be much easier for the Numbering/Bullets feature to do this for you automatically in the first place, like Word does. Again, I fail to see why the developers in OpenOffice don't fix this. It doesn't make sense.

Also, scrolling in OpenOffice Writer isn't as fast as Word. And, Writer in XP is faster than Writer in Ubuntu... Why is that? Um, don't tell me... it's got to do with the intellectual genius at Sun.

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Not a very good way to talk with people around here, and evidently you don't seem to care who you offend. Whether it's someone donating their time and good will to try and assist with your issue, or even if it's a Forum Moderator (XavierP).

I think you need to strive to address your anger management issues, therapy might help.
Acting like you are, I doubt too many people are going to be willing to offer you assistance in the future.

Being polite, will get you much farther in life, than being rude and obnoxious. Think about it, while you ponder your bullet points.

Yes, because not caring about the state of bullets in word processing software shows complacency.


Have you considered that maybe the reason it hasn't been fixed is that it hasn't been noticed? It's certainly possible. Alternatively, it is doing exactly what it is designed to do. Rather than sneering at the people at Sun who donate their code and time to something that we can download and use for no money, why not post up a bug or post on their help area/mailing lists?

Oh I see... So, it's ok for XavierP to offend me, but it's not ok for me to retaliate against his offense. The following is what he said to me that started this ruckus in the first place. I know some of us lack a level of understanding, so I'll re-state here for you:

I took what he said as offense. I strongly suggest that before you judge others that you first look at both sides of the issue. And also take a look at yourself to take care of any hypocrisy. This way, you avoid labeling others and making yourself look bad and obnoxious yourself.

I think you need to strive to address your loneliness issues, a girl might help. Acting like you are, I doubt too many females are going to be willing to offer you assistance or marriage in the future.

Being a real man, will get you farther in life, than being pesky and nosy. Think about it while you ponder your wet bed sheets.

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How you've managed to continue to post like this and not be banned is a minor mystery.

And quakeboy, how you've managed to continue to analyze this situation one-sided is equally a mystery in itself. Such an analysis should make you eligible for being banned yourself.

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You forgot to talk about my mother and father. You're slipping.