Ade Malsasa Akbar contact
Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.
Friday, April 15, 2016 at 22:07

The Navigator feature in LibreOffice Writer is a mapper for the document components. Navigator helps authors to navigate easily into a chosen page based on the component of the document. The main usage of Navigator is to map subtitles/headings inside a document, so an author can go to any subtitle easily and go back easily too. This is very effective in a large document while it has very complex subtitles structure. But Navigator can map another components, such as images, tables, hyperlinks, and some others.



Use Navigator

 

To use navigator, you should have at least one component in a document. You may have one heading, or image, or tables so Navigator can read. To show Navigator, press F5 button (in LibreOffice 3) or press compass button in the right sidebar (in LibreOffice 4 and 5).




Navigate Headings

 

If a document has some text headings (e.g. a short article), or even very complex headings structure (e.g. a thesis or a book), Navigator helps you to jump over one heading to another heading easily. Every heading (subtitle or sub of subtitle) shown in Navigator below the Headings category. To jump, double click one heading and your cursor will be put in the heading you choose directly. To jump back, just double click the heading where the cursor belongs before.


Navigate Images

 

If a document has some images, Navigator can help you to jump over one image to another image. If you want to edit or change many images, this is effective to save the times. Navigator shows the list of images based on the images name. Just double click an image name to jump over.



Navigate Tables 

If a document has some tables, Navigator can help you to jump over one table to another table. You don't need to give caption to every table, because Navigator doesn't read the caption of table. Instead, Navigator reads the table name (to change it: right-click > Table Properties). Navigator shows the list of tables based on the table name.


Navigate Hyperlinks

 

If a document contains some hyperlinks, Navigator can list them all and you can jump over them easily. It is very effective when you have written so many hyperlinks but can not remember in what page you put them.