Yearly Archives: 2007

Best Studying and Writing Music

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Smack in the middle of finals week, I thought it would be useful to tell the world what I listen to while studying (and writing).

I love DJ Shaggy, and his techno shortwave podcasts are great to listen to while studying. He provides mp3s that are around 2 hours long, and there is a huge archive of old podcasts.

My all-time favorite station to listen to while studying or writing is Beethoven.com. I played cello for a long time, and this soothing sounds of classical music keep my attention focused on the task at hand. Beethoven.com provides several sources for their streaming radio station, and here is the one I listen to. It is amazing how often I hear a piece that I played in the orchestra back in high school (Thanks, Mr. Rieke!).

Anyways, if you need to concentrate while doing something on the computer (and I know we all have trouble with that), these are the sounds I like to hear.

How To: Remove Header From First Page in OpenOffice

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I do all of my school papers in OpenOffice.org (for more on OpenOffice, look in Wikipedia) these days, specifically in OpenOffice Writer (the open source equivalent of Microsoft Word). I come upon the same problem fairly frequently, so I am posting my solution here for everyone.

Many paper formatting guidelines call for no header on the first page, with a header that includes the page number (and possibly other information, including name and professor) on subsequent pages. While it may seem difficult to do this in OpenOffice Writer, it is rather easy.

Create a header as your normally would; usually this is by clicking Insert -> Header -> Default and then Insert -> Fields -> Page Number. You should see your header on all pages of your document, including the first page.

Now, place the cursor within the first page of your document (ie- click within the first page of the document and then make sure you see a blinking cursor on the first page), and then select from the menu Format -> Styles and Formatting. Select the fourth icon at the top of the dialog box (if you hover over it, it says “Page Styles”). Now, double-click on “First Page”.

Once you double-click on “First Page”, the header on the first page will magically disappear, while keeping the header on each subsequent page intact.

For even more customizability, you can create an entirely different header for the first page instead of leaving it completely off.

To do this, again make sure your cursor is inside the first page of the document. Then click Insert -> Header -> First Page. Now, a header will appear on the first page of your document and you can place any text or fields (page number, etc.) within this first page-only header.

If you have any problems with this quick fix for headers in OpenOffice Writer, please leave a question in the comments section below and I will try my best to answer your query.

Also, look forward to more of these How To’s (for Open Office and other applications) in the near future.

Lastly, if you would like to try out OpenOffice, you can download it for free from the OpenOffice website or your can download a portable version here which you can unzip locally and delete after trying out this amazing piece of community-produced software.