I have used Open Office pretty much since moving to Colorado in 2005. I love the ease of use, the simplicity, the similarity to Word and to be honest the fact that its free. So when Smashwords recommended me giving up my OO I was totally O.O (haha!). I talked to my husband and decided I would try uploading one with OO still.
It took a tiny bit of interpretation from Mark Coker's Style Guide to get the idea of what he was saying. (But I think with the crazy repetition and language it would have taken me the same time if I did have Word!) No offense to Mark but he made that WAY more complicated then it needed to be!
One of the SW style requirements is no "tabs," but as a fiction writer I really like indented paragraphs. They provided a work around setting first line to indent, simple enough except that I couldn't find the coding for "finding tab" It was certainly not the "^d ex^?" whatever he had listed that Word uses. So, with A Night With Them Both, I simply went through and found all of my tabs manually exchanging them for the indent. With A Voyeur's Gift - nearly 3 times in length - and the fact that I have nearly 50 more titles to upload - and will have 50+ in the near future I hope! I had to find a way to "find tab" in my find and replace box.
So I Googled it and sure enough quickly found my shortcut. All I had to do was select expressions and type in \t. I wanted to sing - and so I came here. SING! haha.
The point is that being a tiny bit tech savvy will help an author in so many ways, and no matter how many times you think you "know the program fully" you will discover something new.
Not to say "neener neener, pumpkin weener" to Mark Coker, but Open Office shows beautifully on Smash Words and its 10 times easier then you are making it sou
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