Miscellaneous Tips

Contents

1. Changing the Font Size in Help
2. Customising the Insert Key
3. Formatting Footnotes in Columns
4. Documents Toolbar
5. Transferring Customisations to another PC
6. Text Colour Icons
7. Margin Notes

Changing the Font Size in Help

If you have a scroll-wheel mouse, just hold down the Control key and scroll up or down. If you don’t have a scroll-wheel, then do this.

Start a new HTML document or switch to Web Layout mode from the View menu. Again, from the View menu, select Zoom, and choose the view percentage by which you wish to increase the font size — say, 120%. The font size in help will be increased by 120%. To focus on the text you can hide the navigation pane by clicking the first icon on the toolbar in Help.

To restore the default font size, repeat using 100%.

Customising the Insert Key

The insert key will toggle insert/typeover mode by default.

If you find that this causes more trouble than its worth, just assign the key to another function, from the Tools, Customize, Keyboard dialogue.

I assigned it to show and hide the Status line. This saves screen space, but the status line is easily restored if it is needed.

Formatting Footnotes in Columns

It is not possible to do automatically, but as usual there is a viable work-around if you are determined to do this. The problem with such work-arounds is that they make a lot of extra work, especially if you need to edit the document later.

When you have finished all editing, and are ready to do the final formatting for print or producing a PDF, then on those pages where you have several short notes you must manually insert the note references, note numbers, and copy/paste notes into note 1, deleting notes 2, 3 etc., as I have done here to demonstrate.

• Divide the width of your page by the number of note columns you want to use. In this case, my A5 page with 0.5" margins is 4.83" wide, so I have three columns of notes, each 1.61" wide.
• In one footnote, set tab stops for the second and third columns of notes, at 1.61" and 3.22" in this case.
• Update the footnote paragraph style so that all footnotes have the same tab stops.
• At the end of footnote 1, tab to the first tab stop, type “2” and format the number with the “Footnote Characters” character style.
• Cut and paste the text from note 2.
• Tab to the second tab stop, type “3” and format the number with the “Footnote Characters” character style.
• Cut and paste the text from note 3.
• In the document text, delete note 2, type a “2” and format it with the “Footnote Anchor” character style.
• Delete note 3, type a “3” and format it with the “Footnote Anchor” character style.

In Open Office, you can scroll down quickly through the notes throughout the whole document using the cursor keys. You could perhaps record a macro or two to automate the format note number, and cut and paste actions.

Though this work-around is rather labour intensive, there may be some documents where this kind of work is justified. Obviously it can save a lot of pages, and that saves money when it comes to printing.

Documents Toolbar

One of the less satisfactory thing about Open Office (and most other programs) is that one frequently has to use the Open File dialogue to find a file that is no longer on the recent files list. This list keeps changing, and sometimes gets cleared for no apparent reason.

To create a new toolbar, right click on the Windows Taskbar, and Select Toolbars, New Toolbar. Browse to the folder where you store your OpenOffice documents and add that folder as a toolbar. If you organise your documents carefully, and only keep the most recent work in the root folder, the toolbar dropdown menu will be a short list of your most recent projects, plus several folders for older projects. 

I find this much quicker and easier than using the File Open dialogue, or the Recent Files list. When I want to modify the toolbar, I just reorganise my Open Office document folders. I use 7-Zip to backup the entire folder tree on a daily basis, and copy the archive to a USB drive.

Because I like to have my Windows Start menu and Taskbar at the top of the screen, I have a pulldown menu. If you keep your taskbar at the bottom, you will have a popup menu.

Transferring Customisations to Another PC

User customisations such as modified toolbars, menus, keyboards, and macros are stored in the “User” folder in C:\Documents and Settings\ <UserName>\ Application Data\OpenOffice.org2\user\

To copy the settings from one PC to another archive this folder on the source PC and extract the contents (of User.7z or User.zip) in the appropriate folder on the destination PC.  To find this hidden folder you will need to temporarily change the Folder Options in Windows Explorer (Tools, Folder Options, View) to “Show hidden files and folders.” Change this setting back to the default hidden state after you have finished.

Update the archive every time you make any more changes to your OpenOffice setup, and copy the archive to a backup drive. If you need to install OpenOffice on a new PC, you will soon be back up to speed.

Text Colour Icons

In Tools, Customise, Toolbars, Format, there are two apparently identical icons with the same description, but the second icon behaves differently. When clicked, instead of showing the format painting cursor, it changes the colour of the word that the cursor is in, or the colour of text at the cursor position if the cursor is at a space.

If you select text first, then chose a colour from the dropdown palette it will apply that colour to the selected text.

A bonus is that clicking the icon will show the Format Character dialogue, so this button can serve a dual purpose. You can use it for applying occasionally used character attributes like Superscript or Small Caps.

Whenever any formatting is used frequently throughout a document, I recommend using a character style, which makes it much easier to change later, but direct formatting is sometimes useful.

Margin Notes

Notes in Open Office are currently very limited, but this feature is scheduled to be improved in version 3.0 (a development build is already available). Currently, notes will not be exported when a document is exported to PDF, and implementation in Writer documents as little yellow rectangles is rather primitive.

As a workaround, create a custom frame styles for margin notes. Use a paragraph style too for the text with a small font. Anchor the frame to character, horizontal position right side of page, with borders top and bottom, and spacing to the contents of 0.2”. Add spacing between paragraphs of 0.2”, and use no paragraph indent.

Moving notes around is not difficult, but do by dragging the anchors, not the frames. The frame can be set to be printing or non-printing, which can be edited in the Frame style if you change your mind later and wish to print the notes or not.