A current project of mine is compiling and editing the songbook portion of the ConCertino 2018 program book. I’m using OpenOffice for the pages and Finale for the music notation.

This is the first time I’ve worked with the full version of Finale on a project. Previously I’d used the budget versions, called Finale Allegro and later Finale PrintMusic. When the publisher dropped PrintMusic and offered a cheap upgrade to Finale, I took them up on it. I didn’t think that the extra features would be that useful for my purposes, but they’ve turned out to be quite helpful.

Finale features

Finale has more options for scaling staves. The first song that I added ran just a few measures into a second page, and being able to scale it down was very helpful.

When I wanted to export the music in order to import it into OpenOffice, I was dismayed at first. The “Export” item under the File menu gave eight options, but none of them are suitable for creating an image that another application can import. But some playing around revealed that if I selected the Graphics tool, it gave me additional options. I could export the pages as EPS, JPEG, PDF, PNG, SVG, or TIFF. I went with PNG and was able to import it into OpenOffice without any problems.

Odd and even pages in OpenOffice

I’m familiar with OpenOffice for writing articles, letters, and such, but using it to create a book forced me to expand my understanding of it. It was possible to get odd and even footers, but hardly obvious. Searching the Web for help got me a lot of advice that applied to older versions and doesn’t quite work with the current one (4.1.5). Here’s the trick, in case anyone is curious or happens to find this post while researching the same question.

Select anywhere in the first page and bring up the list of page styles (Format > Styles and Formatting). Double-click “Right page.” That will set the style of the first page.

Next, right-click the “Right page” style in the list and select “Modify.” Under the “Organizer” tab, Set “Next style” to “Left page” and click OK. Then right-click the “Left page” style and set its next style to “Left page.” Now you can set up different footers or headers for the left and right pages. If you want footers, go to the Insert menu and insert “Left footer” and “Right footer.”

Now all I have to do is bookmark this post so I’ll remember next time. :)