I’ve been using open office for years as a free alternative to microsoft office. It is a great program, but it has some limitations and frustrations. One of the most frustrating things is the way page styles work. Page styles allow each type of page to be formatted differently which is great, but it has a strange feature where the page style itself determines the style of the following page. That means it is difficult to get the page styles working correctly in the correct sequence. The trick to making page styles work for you is to create a few page styles how you want and then whenever you want to change page styles instead of altering the information on that particular page use “Insert – Manual Break – Page Break” and set the next page to the style you want to use for the page you are inserting. That page break makes certain the “next page style” is not the default “next page style” but rather the one you manually set. Ugh. What a pain.
Another major problem with open office is that footnotes and end notes can only appear at the bottom of the page or end of the document. I have found no suitable way to alter this. That is a major problem because being able to place marginalia and center column footnotes on the same page with regular footnotes are very important for formating a study Bible. That is something the developers should work on. The best way to accomplish this is to either have two new types of footnotes that can either go in the margins and center column or in fact anywhere and track separate from the other footnotes rather than just making the same set of footnotes already used by the program customizable. An unlimited amount of footnote sets that could be placed anywhere on the page would be ideal.