Aren’t you tired of those boring résumé, all looking the same, black and white written in “Times New Roman” not so interesting to look at? Because I’ll tell you one thing, you can be the awesomest person in your field with a huge list of achievements and lots of qualifications but if your CV doesn’t visually stand out is pretty sure you will be waiting a long time for them to call.
It is normal to think there’s no much to do with a text editor like Microsoft Word® or LibreOffice Writer, besides using some clipart’s images or changing the font color. Well, I have good news for you, here I’ll show you how to make your résumé look sexier and stand out from the rest using LibreOffice Writer.
First a quick introduction to LibreOffice if you don’t use it yet, why is it so cool? Because it’s FREE, open source and it works on Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac so your documents keep the same visual style through all platforms. LibreOffice is a productivity suit that gives you all the applications you need to produce and process data: Writer allows you to create textual documents, Calc is the spreadsheets application, Impress for presentations and there are others like Draw, Math and Base, feel free to explore their website and download this wonderful pack of applications.
Now let’s make our résumé shine with LibreOffice Writer:
1.- Page Properties
First we’re going to delete the barriers that keep us caged inside the box 
, what I mean is to set the margins to zero so we can use all the available space to add visual elements that will make our CV look way better; to do this go to the menu Format > Page… and click the Page tab if it’s not selected by default (see image 1):
Step 1: Page Properties
Then select the paper format and put zero for all margins (see image 2):
Step 2: Page Settings
Once you’ve done this LibreOffice will prompt you a message asking if you’re sure you want to apply the settings even if the margins are out of print range, click Yes (see image 3):
Step 3: Apply Page Settings
2.- Adding visual appeal
Now we are ready to add some images in order to make our document look better, if you don’t feel creative enough I suggest you to check Colourlovers’ Patterns I’m sure you will find something suitable for you. I’m going to use a pattern called Navaho, to insert an image go to the menu Insert > Picture > From File… (see image 4):
Step 4: Insert a Picture
I’ll use this image as a top and bottom border, you just have to adapt the image to the width of your document. Remember this is the part where you have to exploit your artistic skills (see image 5):
Step 5: Resize the image
I’m just going to copy the same image to use it in the bottom of the document (see image 6):
Step 6: Copy the image and place it in the bottom
3.- Adding borders
If we want to keep our text inside the print area we will use a little trick, let’s add some “invisible” borders to cage our content inside the box, go to the menu Format > Page… and click the Borders tab, click the option Set All Four Borders under the Line arrangement section and select White as the line color, under the Spacing to contents put the space in centimeters you want the text to be from the borders, I used 2 centimeters (see image 7):
Step 7: Set an Invisible Border
Once you’ve done this, your content will be “caged” inside the print area (see image 8):
Step 8: Content inside the print area
4.- Adding content and more visual elements
It’s time to add some content, I added the black block, first name, last name, degree, then I used the rectangle shape from the Drawing toolbar (menu View > Toolbars > Drawing) to make everything more visually appealing (see images 9, 10, 11):
Step 9: Add a rectangle using the drawing tools
Step 10: Results after using the rectangle tool
Step 11: Adding Section Titles
Now I’m going to use the shadow option to make the titles different from the rest of the text, highlight the text you want to change the style then right-click and select Character… (see image 12):
Step 12: Styling the Characters
Click on the Font Effects tab then check the Shadow option (see image 13):
Step 13: Adding Shadow to the Text
Finally, once you’ve finished adding all the content and tweaking the visual style you just need to save the file, if you’re used to work on Word® then you know their default format is .doc, in LibreOffice the default format for Writer is .odt, the problem is: if the person you’re going to send your résumé don’t have LibreOffice installed, she won’t be able to open it, so I’ll show you how to save in .odt and export the file as a PDF (.pdf) so everyone can see your beautiful CV .
To save your document just go to the menu File > Save, the application will show you a window where you can select where to store the file and put a name, you could also change the file format (you can save as .doc if you want, but it won’t look the same) (see image 14):
Step 14: Save the document
And let’s finish exporting our résumé as a PDF file so everyone can open it without any problems, just go to the menu File > Export as PDF… or just hit the PDF icon on the applications toolbar, the system then will show you a window where you can select the destination folder and the name (see image 15):
Step 15: Export as PDF file
Congratulations, you’ve created a résumé that will stand out from the rest! If you want to see my results, feel free to download the LibreOffice Writer and the PDF files linked below:
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