Why can’t I create lines automatically in Writer?

Why can’t I create lines automatically in Writer?

Q Thanks for a great magazine. I recently bought my son-inlaw a gift subscription to Computeractive so we can share tips and experiences. Speaking of which, I liked the tip from Sheila Waters (Readers’ Tips, in Issue 623) where she explained a simple way to draw a horizontal line in Microsoft Word. LibreOffice Writer appears to offer the same feature – at least, according to the Help file. It’s called ‘Automatic lines in Writer’ but it doesn’t seem to work. I’m running the latest version of LibreOffice, 7.2.5.2. Any suggestions?

Alan Rich

A What a lucky son-in-law! We’re sure your son-in-law would join us in appreciating Sheila’s tip. And yes, a similar feature does exist in Writer. However, for reasons we can’t fathom, it doesn’t seem to be enabled by default – at least not on the handful of test machines we tried with recent copies of LibreOffice.

Fortunately, this is easy to rectify when you know how. Open the Tools menu, then point to AutoCorrect and click AutoCorrect Options. Next, in the AutoCorrect box, click to select the Options tab. Look for the ‘Apply border’ option (see screenshot above). Click to tick the box in the column headed ‘T’ – which stands for ‘AutoCorrect while typing’ – then click OK.

You can now create lines of varying styles by typing three hyphens, underscores or asterisks on a new line, then pressing Enter, just as in Word.