Applications : Writer - Your First Page
Toolbars
Writer is a traditional Word Processor that has a Menu Bar, a Standard Toolbar and a Formatting Toolbar, all the tools to get you started.

Hover over the icons on these toolbars to see what they do, most have shortcut keys, many involve holding down the Control (Ctrl) Key and then pressing another key. Use these shortcut keys: its a great way to become familiar with a keyboard, it looks professional and will speed you up as you work through a large document.

Microsoft Word uses the Ribbon rather than toolbars, if this is your preferred work flow then on the Menu Bar Click View » User Interface » Tabbed.

I prefer toolbars and Writer gives you some options to tweak them.

On the Menu Bar Click Tools » Options and in Options Click on View, there you can choose an Icon Style for the toolbars, I use Colibre. You can also make your toolbar icons larger or smaller.
Elementary Icon Toolbars

Tango Icon Toolbars

Side Panel
Writer also has a nifty Sidebar that you might accidentally display. If its your first time using Writer you might find this a distraction, so to close it, Click on Hide, you probably clicked on Show by mistake and it will disappear. Or on the Menu Bar click View»Sidebar to clear the tick box.

OK enough waffle, time to start and use Writer, lets quickly mash up eight pages of content, format that content, put headers and footers onto our pages, play with images, lists, tables. Create a table of contents so our doc can be easily navigated through. Print the doc as a brochure - saves on paper, think of the trees. Export the doc a PDF so that you can inflict share with others, they can print it out if they want to!!

Does any of the above fill you with dread or do you have no idea of what you have just read, GREAT, all will become clear. We will start off with baby steps and to make things easier, if you have a decent screen size, shrink this browser window down to about a third or quarter of the screen and open Writer and adjust that window to fill the rest of the screen.
Now you are all set up to work your way through the rest of this article, enjoy :-) !!!
The First Page
Click on the top of the page and type in Writer
and press Enter.

Yes your first piece of text, before we go any further, Save your Document so on the Menu Bar Click File » Save or Click on the Save Icon or better still use the shortcut key Ctrl+S, this is the first time to save this document so the Save Box will pop up.

By default Writer will save files into the Users Documents Folder, I am going to name the file WriterCrashCourse
, but I want to save it into its own folder so I clicked on the Folder Icon to create a new folder which I called Writer
and hit the Create Button.

Now my location has changed to the Writers Folder and at the bottom of the Save Box I clicked Save.
By default Writer saves text documents as a .odt (Open Document Text File), if you want to save in an alternate file format Click on the Drop Down Menu to choose from .docx (Microsoft Office 2007 on) or .doc (Microsoft Office 2003 and previous), or another listed file format.
Now to put more text into our document, Select the three paragraphs below and Right Click and Choose Copy, better still just Select the text and use the shortcut key Ctrl+C.

Our Mission is to create an eight page document consisting of a Cover Page, an Index Page and some Content where we will play with Text, Lists, a Table, Images and Page Styles.
Finally we will Publish it by Exporting the Document as a PDF file and Print it as a Brochure.
Let the fun begin.
Click a few lines below Writer
and Paste the text into your document, there are many ways to do this, I prefer the shortcut key Ctrl+V.

Great, now for our second page, make sure that you are below the last paragraph, on the Menu Bar Click on Insert » Page Break or use the shortcut key Ctrl+Enter (Return), now we are on Page 2.

Type in Table Of Contents
and do another Page Break.

Now we are on Page Three, type in Content
and press Enter.

Now to put some Content..
.