Open Office User Guides
Has user guides for all parts of the suite. But, two chapters from the Writer Guide are particularly useful for dissertations, even if they are a little old:

• Ch12 - Creating Tables of Contents, Indexes, and Bibliographies 31-Dec-2006
• Ch13 - Working with Master Documents 31-Dec-2006

Tutorials for Open Office
This is a collection of a wide variety of formulas. Here are some that you may want to check out.

• Construction a Bibliography
• Master Documents
• Introduction To Templates
• Introduction To Indexes
• Create and Modify A Table of Contents
• Different Page Styles In a Document

Should you run into problems, here is the Advanced Writer Forum, in which people talk about such tasks as making books.

Links from Phinished

Probably the best resource out there for writing your dissertation is Phinished. Here are some discussions involving OpenOffice:

Anyone else using OpenOffice for their Dissertation?

Reference Software on Linux - Using OpenOffice Spreadsheet for Bibliography

Writers Tools for OpenOffice

Using Bibliography software with OpenOffice

Welcome!

This is my blog to tell of my trials and travails of using OpenOffice to write my dissertation. I hope you will find it helpful if you are writing a large document with OpenOffice, or if you are writing a dissertation with any other software. Like in the Red-Green show: "We're all in this together. Keep your stick on the ice."