Yeah, yeah, I know there’s going to be tons of people who are going to immediately exclaim “You should be using LaTeX instead of OpenOffice!”, but it is not always an option. I try to write some of my papers in LaTeX but often I am unable to as either my teacher wants a slightly modified MLA format which is near impossible to do easily (that i’m aware of such as a separate title page with the included MLA template) or I need to digitally upload the document in Microsoft Word format. Neither of these are exactly ideal scenarios to be using LaTeX and fudging with it hours before a deadline. Another possibility is the teacher will accept nothing out of the ordinary of how Word formats things which is the cause of this current rant: the header.

OpenOffice implements headers in a very different way than Word does relating to margins. Word traditionally has always written its headers inside the top margin where text is not normally printed, which is what my teacher expects to see. OpenOffice, however, does not follow this behavior as it takes the meaning of margins literally.  In OpenOffice having a top margin of say 1-inch means that the inserted header will start below that 1-inch mark where one would traditionally type. Many people will argue that OpenOffice actually gets this “right”, but what’s right isn’t helpful when my grade depends on it.

So my problem basically boils down to the following issue of getting OpenOffice to mimic Word’s behavior with respect to headers and margins. I suppose I could set a fixed height for the header field and make the top margin really small to compensate for this, but that seems like a royal pain to do. Thankfully for the time being I’ve not hit any teachers that have really nailed me on the incorrect formatting. I have to say that this is one of the only current issues I have against OpenOffice and I find it a life saver in college otherwise.