Often a cell area of your Calc sheet or a table inside a Writer text document needs to be formatted. The first row and/or column should have a different background, the font should look bold or italic, the values should get some numbering formats.

And you have at least three wishes when applying the formatting:

• Fast and easy, with as few clicks as possible.

• Always the same style.

• Looking nice.

The answer is easy: It is called AutoFormat. AutoFormat defines a set of different formatting rules and properties with a distinctive name. Several AutoFormats are already supplied and installed in Calc and Writer.

If you don't like the supplied AutoFormats, you can add your own AutoFormats and give them the names you want. Format a table as you like, select all the formatted cells, then open Format-AutoFormat to add your formatting as a new style. Easy, isn't it?

You can add backgrounds, borders, set automatic cell width and height, use currency formats, and more. You can even apply patterns, which means defining alternating colors for alternating rows or columns.

To apply an AutoFormat

1. Select an area of cells.

2. Choose Format - AutoFormat.

3. Select a name from the left list and watch the preview in the dialog.

4. Click OK to apply the AutoFormat.

A: Look here, darling, I've got something to tell you right now, and it is of highest priority.

B: You make me curious. Continue.

A: I've found some reasons to feel some affection towards you.

B: Can you be more precise in this statement, please?

A: I've found four reasons to feel an affection towards you increased up to 100 percent.

B: Go ahead ...

A: These are the reasons, in order from top to bottom:

1. You look so beautiful.
2. You give me reason to live.
3. I get excited when I think of you.
4. We can exchange more than words.

B: This is a numbered list, shouldn't it be a bullet list?

A: You're right as always, darling. I love the way you edit my words right out of my mouth.

B: Thank you for saying that. Al least you got the punctuation right. But you could have read the Sun Editorial Style Guide, Chapter 3, and follow that advice.

A: You're welcome, darling - better I wake up now.

This can happen to a tech writer when mixing up the following:

• reviewing a newly written Sun book all day long
• reading High Fidelity by Nick Hornby late at night
• trying to live a personal life, as much as possible, if possible at all

OpenOffice.org contains many useful features designed to simplify your office tasks. One of those features is the quick and easy drawing of text tables.

Imagine you write a text and need a table with three columns, the first column narrow, the other two wide. You can start drawing that table without the need to reach for the mouse, search that icon, or drag the borders between the columns. Just enter a line like this:

+------+-----------------------+-------------------------+

The very moment that you press Enter at the end of this line, it gets converted into a table, where the plus characters are turned into vertical borders.

(Note that the html format has its own mind where the column borders should be. In Writer they are where you placed the plus characters.)

If that conversion doesn't happen, you might have disabled this feature in the past. Enable "Create table" in Tools - AutoCorrect - Options. Check that Format - AutoFormat - While Typing is enabled, too.

Start the initial line with some space characters to create a table that begins at some distance from the page margin.

While you are in the Tools - AutoCorrect - Options dialog, click the Help button to see what else is available that can automatically change your text.

Now you see them, now you don't - I'm writing about those toolbars, as we call them, that keep popping up whenever you don't need them. While later, once you managed to get rid of them, you could need the one or the other toolbar, but where is it now?

OpenOffice.org by default tries to show the toolbars that you might need, according to the current context. When you use the down arrow key to scroll down a Writer text, different toolbars can appear.

• With the cursor in a table, you see the Table toolbar.

• Position the cursor inside a numbered list, and you see the Bullets and Numbering toolbar.

• A list inside a Writer table cell even shows both of the above.

• Scrolling across an image, another toolbar asks for your attention. And so on.
  

Now, if you don't want such a toolbar you can close it with the small icon on top of that toolbar. Scroll further down and back, and there it is again. This can get annoying.

But keep in mind that toolbars are there to help you with editing, formatting, inserting new objects, and so on.

These kind and helpful companions can be scared away in two different ways:

• Click the Close icon on a toolbar to close the bar temporarily. It will reappear as soon as possible.

• Choose “View - Toolbars - (name of the toolbar)” to close it forever.

A permanently closed toolbar will never again come back. Except when you summon it up by “View - Toolbars - (name of the toolbar)”.

By the way, it's easy to lose track of what all those icons do. Here are another two companions, one temporarily and one permanently: You can enable an extended help text for every icon.

• Press Shift+F1 and point the mouse to an icon. You see the extended help text. This mode is valid until you click anywhere or press Esc.

• Choose "Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org - General" and enable the extended help tips permanently.

All page properties for Writer text documents, for example the page orientation, are defined by page styles. By default, a new Writer text document uses the Default page style for all pages. If you open an existing text document, different page styles may have been applied to the different pages.

It is important to know that changes that you apply to a page property will only affect the pages that use the current page style. The current page style is listed in the Status Bar at the lower window border.

To change the page orientation for all pages

If your text document consists only of pages with the same page style, you can change the page properties directly:

1. Choose Format - Page.

2. Click the Page tab.

3. Under Paper format, select Portrait or Landscape.

4. Click OK.

To change the page orientation only for some pages

OpenOffice.org uses page styles to specify the orientation of the pages in a document. Page styles define more page properties, as for example header and footer or page margins. You can either change the Default page style for the current document, or you can define own page styles and apply those page styles to any parts of your text.

At the end of this help page, we'll discuss the scope of page styles in detail. If you are unsure about the page style concept, please read the section at the end of this page.

Note: Unlike character styles or paragraph styles, the page styles don't know a hierarchy. You can create a new page style based on the properties of an existing page style, but when you later change the source style, the new page style does not automatically inherit the changes.

To change the page orientation for all pages that share the same page style, you first need a page style, then apply that style:

1. Choose Format - Styles and Formatting.

2. Click the Page Styles icon.

3. Right-click a page style and choose New. The new page style initially gets all properties of the selected page style.

4. On the Organizer tab page, type a name for the page style in the Name box, for example "My Landscape".

5. In the Next Style box, select the page style that you want to apply to the next page that follows a page with the new style. See the section about the scope of page styles at the end of this help page.

6. Click the Page tab.

7. Under Paper format, select Portrait or Landscape.

8. Click OK.

Now you have defined a proper page style with the name "My Landscape". To apply the new style, double-click the "My Landscape" page style in the Styles and Formatting window. All pages in the current scope of page styles will be changed. If you defined the "next style" to be a different style, only the first page of the current scope of page styles will be changed.

The scope of page styles

You should be aware of the scope of page styles in OpenOffice.org. Which pages of your text document get affected by editing a page style?

One page long styles

A page style can be defined to span one page only. The First Page style is an example. You set this property by defining another page style to be the "next style", on the Format - Page - Organizer tab page.

A one page long style starts from the lower border of the current page style range up to the next page break. The next page break appears automatically when the text flows to the next page, which is sometimes called a "soft page break". Alternatively, you can insert a manual page break.

• To insert a manual page break at the cursor position, press Ctrl+Enter or choose Insert - Manual Break and just click OK.

Manually defined range of a page style

The Default page style does not set a different "next style" on the Format - Page - Organizer tab page. Instead, the "next style" is set also to be Default. All page styles that are followed by the same page style can span multiple pages. The lower and upper borders of the page style range are defined by "page breaks with style". All the pages between any two "page breaks with style" use the same page style.

You can insert a "page break with style" directly at the cursor position. Alternatively, you can apply the "page break with style" property to a paragraph or to a paragraph style.

Perform any one of the following commands:

• To insert a "page break with style" at the cursor position, choose Insert - Manual Break, select a Style name from the listbox, and click OK.

• To apply the "page break with style" property to the current paragraph, choose Format - Paragraph - Text Flow. In the Breaks area, activate Enable and With Page Style. Select a page style name from the listbox.

• To apply the "page break with style" property to the current paragraph style, right-click the current paragraph. Choose Edit Paragraph Style from the context menu. Click the Text Flow tab. In the Breaks area, activate Enable and With Page Style. Select a page style name from the listbox.

• To apply the "page break with style" property to an arbitrary paragraph style, choose Format - Styles and Formatting. Click the Paragraph Styles icon. Right-click the name of the paragraph style you want to modify and choose Modify. Click the Text Flow tab. In the Breaks area, activate Enable and With Page Style. Select a page style name from the listbox.

Windows users can mark the second Tuesday each month to be the “patch day” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_Tuesday). With clocklike regularity some severe and critical security holes get fixed. In the accompanying advisories you can read that before these patches were applied, any evil minded person had been able to take control of your computer.

It is a good thing to patch these security holes, but wait: when new security holes get fixed every month, will there be an end to those chain of holes some day? Is your computer secure following any patch day? Following the ten thousandth patch day?

The answer: your computer will never be secure. There will always be security holes that until now almost no one knows - except for some evil minded people somewhere else on this planet, may be.

The bad news about this is that, although most of computer viruses and trojans and other malware are aimed at Windows computers, other systems are vulnerable, too.

Just enter “security patch quicktime” to any Internet search page, or enter “security patch Oracle”, or even “security patch Sun”. You will find that no one is safe.

The good news is that you can take action to secure your computer. The extent of security will never be “100 percent secure”. But you can make your computer more secure than it is without any protection.

It's a little bit like life, where there are real viruses and other threats to your health. Use common sense, but in the best sense. Get good security advice and protection where it is necessary. Avoid unnecessary risks. Live with the fact that total security is not possible, and don't let yourself be scared too much. No risk, no fun. No unnecessary risk, no unnecessary pain.

Visit a page like http://onguardonline.gov/stopthinkclick.html and study the security rules.

By the way, you create backup copies of your documents and store them at a secured place? What if a hurricane or fire destroys your computer and the shelf with all your backup CDs?

Wouldn't it be a nice idea to have copies of your important documents on a secured and trusted web server? With your documents stored on a web server, you can access them from any place in the world, wherever there is a public Internet access point. You trust your bank to store your money, so you - and only you - can use any ATM or cash machine worldwide to retrieve your money. Would you trust a company to store your documents in the same secure way?

Just in case you missed it, the new OpenOffice.org Community forum opened it's virtual doors recently. This announcement was sent out on the ooo-announce mailing list:

The OpenOffice.org Community announces the opening of the OpenOffice.org Community Forum http://user.services.openoffice.org. This new Forum goes beyond being simply a knowledge base of questions and answers and is rather a place for OpenOffice.org users to interact freely with each other.

The Forum has been established by a team of enthusiasts who bring a wealth of expertise gained in providing OpenOffice.org forum-based support. Initially launched in English, the new platform has the capability to support multiple languages in future. Your native-language community can tell you what support is available in your language http://projects.openoffice.org/native-lang.html

This free resource powerfully complements the other user services and support OpenOffice.org offers to individuals, companies, and governments, including those listed on the Support Page, http://support.openoffice.org.

The Community Forum organizers would like to express their gratitude to all those who've made this possible, including:

• The OpenOffice.org Documentation Project http://documentation.openoffice.org/
• The Sun community support group
• The Sun network support staff in Hamburg, Germany
• All their colleagues who have spent an incredible amount of their personal time in setting up this new site

The Forum is available now for all to use and is ready for your participation. Whether you have questions to ask or answers to provide, you are very welcome.

The OpenOffice.org Community

If you have read and write access to a server on the Internet, you can open and save your files directly using OpenOffice.org (OOo). The following protocols are available to transfer your files:

• FTP

• HTTP

• HTTPS (starting with OOo 2.4)

Using OOo file dialogs

To transfer files using Internet protocols, you must use the OOo file dialogs to open and save your documents.

Choose "Tools - Options - OOo - General" and enable the "Use OOo dialogs" checkbox.

Opening a file from the Internet

Now you can choose "File - Open" or press Ctrl+O and enter the full name of any file that OOo can open. Don't forget to enter the protocol at the beginning of the name.

To open the ODF text document "mydocument.odt" which resides on the server www.myserver.com in the folder myfolder, you can enter the following text as a file name:

http://www.myserver.com/myfolder/mydocument.odt

This is only a hypothetical example to illustrate the syntax - do not enter that server name now as it might exist in real life.

You can also start the full name with ftp:// instead of http:// in case there is an FTP server running at the other end.

Secure file transfer

Starting with OpenOffice.org 2.4 you can also use the secure https:// protocol. This secure protocol requires an authentication by name and password.

As you may want to connect to multiple servers using a different name and password each, we introduced a kind of identity management system which allows you to setup a master password. You may already know this from your Firefox web browser. This new master password feature can be found on the redesigned OOo 2.4 "Tools - Options - OOo - Security" dialog.

Using a proxy server

Some Internet service providers may ask you to enter a proxy server. You can enter proxy server addresses and port numbers by "Tools - Options - Internet - Proxy".

Saving to the Internet

When you open a document using an Internet protocol, that document is downloaded to a temporary folder on your local drive. You can edit the document as you like and save it to any other folder on your local drive.

If you have write permission to the web server, you can also use the OOo file save dialog to save the document to the server. You must enter the full name including the protocol to save the document directly to the Internet server. If you just press Ctrl+S you would only update the temporary file on your local drive.

Using the OOo file dialogs, you can easily work with documents stored on an Internet server. This allows you to use Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) as a working environment with OpenOffice.org.

Several methods are available to copy cell styles and page styles from one Calc spreadsheet to another file.

Copying cell styles

You found a document called "StylesApplied.ods" somewhere, and you like the styles that are used to format the cells. You want to apply the same nice cell styles in your own spreadsheet. You know that once the styles show up in the "Styles and Formatting" window, you can easily apply a style to the selected cells by double-clicking the style name.

An easy method is to copy the formatted cells from the source document into your document. For example, use drag-and-drop to copy the cells. This copies the cell styles, too. You can now apply the copied cell styles to the other cells in your spreadsheet, and then delete the cells that you did copy.

Copying cell and page styles

To copy any type of styles you can use any of the following methods:

Creating a new document

If you start with a new document, it is best to use the source document with all those nice styles as a template. Then you can start new documents based on that template whenever you want.

1. Open the source document which contains the styles.

2. Save the document as a template:

   Choose File - Templates - Save. You see the Templates dialog, where you can enter a name for the template and select a category. (Note that the picture shows the Templates dialog of StarOffice 8 on Solaris)
   

   
   

3. In this example, you enter the name "myCalcStyles" and click OK. This saves the document as a template with the name "myCalcStyles.ots" to your OOo user/template directory.

To start a new document based on this template, open the Templates and Documents dialog:

1. Choose File - New - Templates and Documents.

2. Click the Templates icon at the left, then double-click the My Templates category.

   
   

3. Double-click the "myCalcStyles" template.

   A new Calc spreadsheet opens. It is based on the template, contains the styles you want, and has an "untitled" name like all new documents.

Copying styles to an existing document

You can use drag-and-drop in the Template Organizer to copy or move styles between any two documents or templates of the same document type.

1. Open both documents - the source and the destination document.

2. Choose File - Templates - Organize to open the Template Management dialog.

3. Click the drop-down list at the lower left (where you see "Templates"), and select "Documents".

   
   

4. In one of the two list boxes, double-click the source file. If you want, you can double-click the destination file in the other list box to see its style contents, although this is not mandatory.

5. Double-click the Styles entry to open a list of all styles in that file.

6. Drag-and-drop the style you want to copy to the destination file name in the other list. Be sure to hold down the Ctrl key to copy the style. You see a plus sign at the mouse pointer. Without the Ctrl key you would move the style from one file to the other.

7. After copying all styles, click Close and save your destination document.

You can only copy or move styles between the same type of documents. Calc styles can only be copied to Calc documents or Calc templates, Writer styles only to other Writer files.

Sometimes you want to perform a clean reinstallation of OpenOffice.org. No previous settings should be imported from the previous installation. This is not complicated, but it requires one important manual step. First let me explain where the OOo folders are to be found.

The folders

OpenOffice.org occupies two folders with some subfolders on your computer. If you have downloaded a single big OOo file, a third folder is involved.

The download version

If you have downloaded your version, you most possibly have a very big download file in your browser's download directory, and a folder with a name like "OpenOffice.org installation files".

The very big download file has an .exe extension on Windows. It is a self-extracting archive file. You double-click it, and a dialog asks you for the folder where to store the installation files. Later the very big file can be used to archive this version on a backup medium, or you can delete the file.

The "OpenOffice.org installation files" folder should not be deleted, because it contains vital information on the files that get installed. You cannot perform a clean uninstallation of OpenOffice.org if you delete the "OpenOffice.org installation files" folder. --- NOTE: the developer in charge of this mechanism assured me that you can safely delete this whole folder. This is in conflict with my own experience, however. Make your own choice. ---

The setup program

After the self-extracting big archive file has created the "OpenOffice.org installation files" folder it automatically calls the setup program from inside that folder. If you have found OOo on a CD, the setup program is there inside an installation folder.

This setup program displays some dialogs where you can choose the folder and modules to install. To change the default settings, you must select the custom installation.

After setup, you can find the shared files (formerly known as the "network installation" files)

• on Windows systems in a folder that has a name like C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org

• on Linux systems that folder may be located in /opt/openoffice.org

(normally, the version number of OpenOffice.org is a part of that folder names)

All users that want to run OOo should have "read and execute" permissions for these files, but only the administrator should have "write" permissions.

The setup program also installs a desktop integration, either for you or for all users on the machine. This essentially means there are some links in your Start menu that call the programs from the "network installation/programs" folder.

Now, when you or any user starts an executable program file of OOo the first time, the Welcome dialog is displayed. Accept the license and continue through the dialog pages. At the end of this stage, the "profile" folder from the shared "network installation" folder will be automatically copied to your home folder and renamed to "user".

• On Linux systems, you now have a hidden folder like ~/.openoffice.org/user

• On Windows XP systems, this is the folder C:\Documents und Settings\your_name\Application data\OpenOffice.org\user

• On Windows Vista systems, this is the folder C:\Users\your_name\AppData\Roaming\OpenOffice.org\user

(add the version number to the OpenOffice.org folder name)

You may need to enable viewing hidden and system files to be able to see this folder.

Clean removal of all config files

So, after this long explanation, you know some facts about the file structure of OOo on your system. Now I can tell you the trick and give you a tip - this is the OOo Tips and Tricks blog, isn't it?

The trick is this: when an administrator with write permissions to the "network installation" files starts a deinstallation, this only removes the "network installation" files. All the "user" folders of all users are still there. These folders contain the customized configuration that the users have set up, among other files like custom wordbooks, custom autotexts, and much more.

This means if there might be some problem with the user configuration, that uninstalling and reinstalling will not help at all. The user configuration gets not changed by a reinstallation. At least this is true for small upgrades from one developer snapshot to the next. There may be some changes when you install a new release version to the same network folder as the old version. But normally this would not happen, because release versions have different folder names for the "network installation" folder.

So here is the tip: the right way to perform a clean reinstallation, deleting all existing user settings from previous versions, is as follows:

1. First, as an administrator, uninstall the "network installation" files.

2. Then delete the "user" folder from the user's home directory, as stated above. If you do not want a clean reinstallation, do not touch this user folder.

3. Then remove the "OpenOffice.org installation files" folder if it exists.

4. Now the admin can perform an installation of the new "network installation" folder, and every user can start OOo again to automatically copy the "profile" folder to the "user" folder.

After a clean install, every user must set all the personal settings again. Documents that have been saved to other folders are still there, of course.

Sometimes you want to place some text in your Writer document at a position out of normal margins and text lines. In Writer, you use either a graphical text box from the Drawing toolbar, or you use a text frame.

Text box

1. Click the Show Draw Functions icon on the Standard toolbar. This opens the Drawing toolbar at the bottom of the Writer window.

2. Click the T (Text box) icon.

3. Drag open a rectangle where you want the text box.

4. Start to enter your text.

Your text in the text box can be formatted like normal text. Pictures are not allowed inside a text box.

Text frame

1. Choose Insert - Frame. On the dialog, click OK.

2. You see a small standard frame centered between the left and right margins. While it shows the eight green handles, you can move and resize this frame. And you can set the properties for the frame as an object.

3. Click outside the frame to leave the selected object, then click inside the frame to enter text or insert pictures.

 Alternatively, first select the text that you want to see inside a frame, then choose Insert - Frame.

Linked frames

When you create a newsletter, you may want to use linked frames for your story. On page 1 of the newsletter, the text starts with a header and a first chapter, and on page 2 or 3 there is another frame with the remaining text.

1. Create the frames in your document.

2. Click the border of the first frame to select this frame. You see the Frames toolbar.

3. Click the Link frames icon.

4. Now click the next frame to connect the two frames.

Text will flow from the first frame to the second as needed. Only the last frame of a chain of linked frames resizes with the text, all other frames keep their size.

Text boxes and text frames can have borders or no borders, as you like. Open the object's context menu and set the properties. All these text boxes and frames export very well to PDF. When you save your document as html format, you may want to fine-tune the result. And first save the document in OpenDocument ODF format, because you will always lose some formatting when you save to other formats.

Today the Professional Template Pack for OpenOffice.org was released by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

These are all the templates that until now you could only buy together with StarOffice 8. For all of you OOo users out there, these templates are free now, free as in freeware. So don't hesitate to visit the extensions web site and download the template pack. Installation is as easy as double-clicking the *.oxt file that you download.

Currently the templates are in English only, but we will release several additional language versions with localized content soon.

And while you are at extensions.services.openoffice.org please have a look at all the other extensions. New extensions are published so frequently that you will want to bookmark this web site on your personal toolbar.

I've got to admit it's getting better
a little better all the time