Formatting the bibliography

Robert Saunders · General User Joined: 29 Mar 2004 Posts: 30

I have three questions regarding the OOo bibliography.
1. can I enter citations in the text directly from biblio.dbf (as shown by pressing F4)
2. can I resort the database so that all entries are sorted alphabetically by author? At the moment they are sorted by order of record addition.
3. can I format the bibliography table such that where there are > 2 authors, they are listed as Bloggs et al?

Robert Saunders

ftack · Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2004 2:28 am Post subject:

1. I do not think so
2. In the Insert Bibliography Entry, they are sorted alphabetically on "short name". When you pick a short name, Author and Title are displayed on the dialog. Probably you are referring to the F4 data view. There, you can click a column and then one of the "Sort" buttons, either descending or ascending, or "Sort order" where you can sort by a combination of at most three fields (e.g. Autor+date)
3. No, in the bibliography, data from the fields are inserted. There are two options: (1) in the Insert Bibliographic Entry index, click "from Document content", then Edit the record. this change will apply to the current document only. Advantage: you only need to do this once, and it will persist when you need to update the TOC. Disadvantage: the original information is lost, and if one day you need to reformat for another journal, you will have to edit all entries or reinsert them. (2) make your table "editable" by unchecking "Protect against manual changes" in the Insert Index/table dialog, then perform the changes on the table. Disadvantage: next time you update the table, the changes are lost. This "fine tuning" of how individual fields appear in the table is a limitation of the OOo bibliography stytem.

Robert Saunders · General User Joined: 29 Mar 2004 Posts: 30

ftack · Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2004 4:32 am Post subject:

You are right. It displays the entries in the order they are entered in the database, so yes, it can become tricky for larger databases to select a particular record starting with say "B". To make this work, one would need to SORT the database from time to time. This can be done with OOo using Calc.