How Do I Set Up OpenOffice for APA Format?

Open Office is a word-processing program that is free to download from the Internet and contains many of the features of more common programs such as Corel, Microsoft Word and WordPerfect, among others. The program options and menus vary from other programs and may take some practice before mastering the art of word-processing with Open Office. Formatting a student assignment in APA format has been made feasible by the developers of Open Office and requires a quick template download, rather than manual formatting.

Click "File" in the top navigation tool bar while in the Open Office program and orient the cursor to gain access to the drop-down menu from the "New" selection.

Select "Templates and documents" from the "New" drop-down menu which reveals a pop-up box in Open Office. Click "Get more templates online" bringing up an Internet box on the home page of the Open Office template website.

Type "APA" in the search box and click "Search." All templates revealing the APA format are listed. Click the "Use It!" box for the most updated version of APA format to download the template into your Open Office program.

Open the downloaded file by clicking on it. The location of the downloaded file may be different depending on the type of browser used. For instance, in Google Chrome, the downloaded file appears at the bottom of your screen and only requires a click on the small box. In Chrome, the file is also saved under "Downloads" on your computer.

Type your assignment in the already formatted document according to APA style when the Open Office template opens in a new window.