Navigation made easy

Here are some tips about navigating your Writer text documents.

How to scroll exactly one page down or up

If you read a long text document, you might want to scroll down page by page.

But if you press the PageDown key or click in the empty space below the slider on the vertical scrollbar, the resulting view will not please you. You look at the bottom of one page and the top of the next page, instead of reading whole pages. The is quite a problem when you set the view to show two pages side by side, as in a book.

Look at the bottom right of the Writer document window. There are three icons which are designed to help you scrolling pages. By default the two icons with arrows scroll one page up or down. The tip help for these two icons is "Previous page" and "Next page". And this is just what you need to do: click the Next page (ArrowDown) icon to scroll by one page.

The Navigation window

In the middle between both arrow icons, you see a third icon that is called Navigation. Click this icon to open the Navigation window.

Initially the fifth icon from the left is enabled. It is the Page icon, and Page is also shown at the bottom of the Navigation window. This means that by clicking the ArrowUp and ArrowDown icons, you move the view to the previous or next page. Note that ArrowUp and ArrowDown icons are also available in the Navigation window. They work exactly like the two icons at the bottom of the right scrollbar. If you have set the Writer window to show multiple pages in a row, the two Arrow icons move the view by whole rows.

Click any other icon in the Navigation window. For example, if you have several tables in your text document, you can click the top left Table icon. Now you can click the Next table (ArrowDown) icon to position the text cursor into the next table. The view gets scrolled automatically to show the position of the text cursor.

Setting and jumping to Reminders

Reminders are a kind of unnamed bookmarks or cursor positions within the text. They are not saved with the document. In every text document you can set up to five reminders. Set a reminder at the current cursor position by clicking the Set Reminder icon in the Navigator. There is no feedback, it just works!

If you click the Reminder icon in the Navigation window - it shows a paper clip - you can jump to the next or previous reminder.

Moving the cursor or moving the view

You can edit, insert, or delete characters only at the cursor position. Click somewhere in the text to set the position of the cursor. Press the PageUp or PageDown key or the Arrow keys on your keyboard to move the cursor to another position. The view always follows the cursor, so that you can see where the next text that you type will be inserted.

Now use the scrollbar at the right border of the text window, or turn the mouse wheel, or click the Next page or Previous page buttons next to the Navigation window, and this moves the view only. The text cursor stays where it is.

These different ways of moving allow to see an overview of the contents of other pages while leaving the cursor where it is, so you can continue writing where you left the cursor.

Mirrored Text in Draw

You've certainly seen one of those adverts or other title lines, where the title text gets mirrored in front. This can be done in a few easy steps using Draw.

1. Open Draw.

2. Click the Text icon at the lower left on the Drawing toolbar.

3. Drag open a big rectangle, then start typing your title text.

4. Format the text with a bigger font size and choose a font. We use 80 pt Arial. We also click on Bold, then we select a green font color.

5. Click the Line icon at the left of the Drawing toolbar and draw a horizontal line below the text box.

6. Copy the text box. Click the text box, press Ctrl+C. Press Ctrl+V. The copy is at the same position as the original. Move the copy down.

7. Now we must flip the lower text box vertically. This is not possible for a text box, so we convert the text box to polygons. Right-click the text box to open the context menu. Choose Convert - To Polygon.

8. Right-click the converted text and choose Flip - Vertically.

9. Right-click the lower text and choose Area. Click the Gradients tab.

We need a linear gradient that runs from 100% Green at the top down to 100% White at the bottom.

10. Click Add and enter a name for the new gradient, for example "Mirrored Green". Then select Green in the From box.

11. Click Modify to modify the new gradient. Then click OK to apply the gradient to the lower text.

12. To apply some perspective effect, we will slant the mirrored text. Right-click the lower text and choose Position and Size. In the dialog, click the Slant & Corner Radius tab.

13. We select a slant angle of -20 degrees and click OK.

14. Now we use the cursor keys to position the text. With Alt+Cursor key we can fine-tune the position.

15. We save the Draw document in its original Draw format. If we need the result in another application, it is a good idea to convert the whole artwork to a bitmap or to a meta file.

Select the whole artwork, then right-click and choose Convert - To Bitmap. You can also export the artwork as a JPG image. Choose File - Export and select the JPG format. Be sure that Selection is checked to export only the selected artwork, not the whole page.

Those Drawing Icons

OpenOffice.org offers many tools that help you to create nice looking documents easy, somehow intuitively, and fast.

Here are some tricks:

The Drawing toolbar has icons for drawing shapes. In Writer, you must first enable the Drawing toolbar by View - Toolbars - Drawing, or by clicking the Show Draw Function icon on the Standard toolbar. In Draw, you see this toolbar by default near the bottom of the document window.

Look at the icons:

Look at the icon for the Basic Shapes. It is the one with the upright diamonds shape.

The icons that have a down arrow at their right side can be used by three different methods.

• A single click calls the function for a single use. You click the icon, you drag and release the mouse, you get one graphics shape. When you are done, the previous icon on the toolbar gets replaced by the last icon that you used (see the following image, where the diamond shape now is replaced by the last used icon).

  
  

• A double click calls the function for multiple use. Double-click the icon, then draw as many shapes as you want. Click the icon again or press Escape to end the drawing mode.

• Long-click the icon or click the down arrow to show another toolbar. Select an icon from the toolbar. The toolbar disappears, and you can use the new icon.

• Drag-and-drop the icon some way away from its original position to tear off another toolbar. That toolbar turns into a window once you drag it far enough from its position. This window will stay until you close it manually. Select icons from the toolbar as you like.

So by using the icons in a clever way, you can create logos and other illustrations without effort. For the above picture, Snap to Object Border was enabled, see the following image of the Options bar.

With Snap to Object Border, it was easy to copy and paste the first graphics object four times to the right. Positioning was right on first try. After creating one row of icons, the row was selected together, copied and pasted two more times below. A matter of seconds.

Metadata and the Semantic Web

Today I've got an automated e-mail from a software called "Link Manager", telling me that a hyperlink inside one of the books I've published on docs.sun.com isn't valid any more and should be replaced or removed.

This is a nice and welcome service, provided by an external (external to my book text) program. I had to register the book right before publishing, so the Link Manager software did know about the book and the hyperlinks within the text.

Now, there are millions of text documents, online and offline, published on the web or in an intranet, or not published at all, and they all contain information that needs to be kept up to date. Wouldn't it be good to have a type of Link Manager service built into every document? A function that automatically cares for all the information inside your text documents?

How often did you think, while writing a paragraph: "This reference certainly will expire some day, so I must come back here regularly and have a look."

Or you might have a comparison chart with data that will be different in some years, still you want to publish the chart now and not be forced to update it manually ever so often.

And the "Link Manager" service can be valuable far beyond caring for hyperlinks. How often do you write a paragraph and think: "Here I must ask person ABC if this is really right, and there I will insert an image of XYZ as soon as I get one that is free to use", and so on.

Currently, you can insert a note into your text, but this doesn't look good, and it is of no big help if your documents contain many thousand notes. What we need is a method of attaching additional structured information to any text. Information that is visible to tools software, or by request of the user, but that is normally hidden from the human reader.

For a hyperlink in your text, you would need additional information about date and time of insertion, date and time of next validation, may be alternative link to be used in case the original expired, source of the information, may be copyright information and license, author contact information, and much more.

With all these information, it would be possible to have some software tool scanning your documents regularly, checking if everything is OK, changing what is allowed to be changed automatically, or reporting problems to your attention.

Of course, those methods only work on open standard formatted documents, as ODF, and the meta data must be attached following an open standard, too.

Fortunately, such open standards exist. The meta data format is proposed by OASIS.

If you are into technical writing, publishing documentations, you will need standardized metadata in your documents. Every document should have a feedback link, and creation data, page count, copyright information, and more. In Writer, just click Tools > Bibliography Database to see how you can input and edit metadata today. The method used in OpenOffice.org to link to the bibliography database was just a very first step, using proven and available technology, on the road to real RDF metadata. Entering and editing metadata will certainly be more comfortable later.

Many software visionaries and engineers are working on metadata standards, for example using Dublin Core technology, or other developments as in SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System).

The OpenOffice.org software is already prepared for meta data, see the Blog entry by Svante Schubert and the presentation he held at the OpenOffice.org Conference 2007 in Barcelona.

So, OpenOffice.org is prepared to handle meta data in open standard documents, as proposed in the RDF specification.

As you can see from the comments to Svante's blog, the meta data support is a hot topic. Be prepared to meet some dragons here.

This is because there is enormous potential with metadata. Clever designed metadata can transform your text documents, spreadsheets, presentations into almost everything. Using metadata and special metadata aware hardware and software, your web based documents can be used to automate almost every aspect of your reader's life. The automatic programming of video recorders is just the least intrusive effect. A multitude of services can be developed to build upon the metadata, and the financial aspects might look like the next virtual gold rush.

Time will tell. Click the Semantic Web logo to read more about the future of the web.

A nice magazine article by Tim Berners-Lee, the "inventor of the World Wide Web", and others is here. By the way, that old magazine text shows the need of more intelligent link managers: It names an URL of a web page that contains some meta tags, but if you browse to that URL, you find that this page meanwhile got changed by its owner. It's a pity: The owner had no metadata tag sticked automatically onto his web page reminding him that the URL is used in an example about meta tags. In a perfect world, he would have registered his web page to a metadata maintaining service that would have told him that another registered web page links to this web page.

And be happy that your ODF documents will not become outdated. ODF is an open standard, a good citizen of the World Wide Web.

From time to time you may want to publish a document, like meeting minutes, in read-only mode, so that the document is protected against any accidential changes. With OpenOffice.org you have several different special options to publish your document.

Set the "Open this document in read-only mode" option

This option protects the document against accidential changes by the reader. It is easy for anyone to remove the protection and change the contents.

1. Choose Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org - Security.

2. Enable Open this document in read-only mode.

3. Click OK.

4. Save the document.

This option is saved as an internal flag in the document file. When you or another user opens the document with the OpenOffice.org software, the document is in read-only mode. The text (read-only) is appended to the document name in the title bar. This also applies to copies of the document that you create by your system's file manager.

The user cannot edit the document, but the user can click the Edit File icon on the Standard toolbar. This resets the document into normal mode with full editing features. If the user saves the document, overwriting the original file, then the read-only flag is gone and the original contents might be changed.

Save the document as a template

This option protects the document against accidential changes by the reader. On normal opening the "protection" gets removed automatically and the user can change the contents, but only in a copy of the original template document. It is not easily possible to change the original file by accident.

1. Choose File - Save as when you are ready to save the document as a template.

2. Open the File type drop-down list and select ODF Text Document Template (.ott).

3. Enter a name for the template file and click Save.

The text document template gets an extension of .ott. When a user opens the file in OpenOffice.org Writer, a copy of the document is created automatically with the name "Untitled N", where N is a number. The user can edit the contents and save the document as a normal text document with an extension of .odt. The template file remains unchanged on the disk.

Only when the user chooses to save as a template and to overwrite the original template file using the original name, then the original gets changed. This will not happen accidentially.

Set file permissions

This option can protect the document file against overwriting by all users or by users who do not belong to your group. It can even prohibit reading by users. The operating system cares for what is allowed and what is not.

1. Save the document as a normal file.

2. Open the file manager of your operating system, or a terminal or shell window, and set the file permissions.

A user with the right permissions can open the file for reading and/or writing. If the user can only read the file, the document shows (read-only) behind its name in the OpenOffice.org Writer title bar.

The user can click the Edit File icon. A dialog tells the user that the original file cannot be changed and offers to open a copy with the name "Untitled N" for editing. It is not possible for a user without write permissions to overwrite, delete or rename the original file. I haven't tested what happens after copying the file to other folders or other operating systems though.

Publish as PDF

This option creates a file that normally will open in a read-only software without editing capability. You can also publish your Writer document as HTML, and a web browser would open the document. But the PDF normally preserves the original layout better than an HTML file. A user needs special software to edit the PDF document's contents.

• Export the document to PDF. Do any of the following:

• Click the Export Directly as PDF icon on the Standard toolbar, or

• Choose File - Export as PDF. This opens a dialog with more options.

The reader of your document does not need a version of OpenOffice.org to read the contents.

What I like with PDF or HTML documents: I can browse through pages using the spacebar. This should really be possible in Writer, too, when the document is in read-only mode. May be some day in the future OOo gets a browse mode?

Signing a document

There is only one way to guarantee that the document's contents are still original and not changed by any other person. The author must digitally sign the document. This adds some additional information to the document file.

When OpenOffice.org opens a signed original document, it displays a green Signed icon on the Status bar. The user can edit the document, however, but any editing action would invalidate the signature. The green icon turns red immediately.

It might be possible to set a document to open in read-only mode and then to sign it. This would make it less likely that the reader accidentially invalidates the signature.

1. Get a certificate for signing documents. The OpenOffice.org Help has all the necessary information: search for "certifications" or "signing documents".

2. Choose File - Save to save your document as a file.

3. Choose File - Digital Signatures and add your signature.

Save with a password

While "Publish as PDF" is well suited for a document to be published, the "Save with password" option is best to protect against publishing the document contents. OpenOffice.org uses a very strong password protection method, so a user will definitely need the correct password to open the document. If the password is chosen well (long enough, not a word from any dictionary of the world, etc), then it is almost impossible to see the contents without knowing the password.

You can save a document with a password. Check the option in the File-Save dialog. Then publish the document on your web space or hand out copies of the document to your audience. Give the password that is needed to open the document only to those users who are allowed to open the document. They can read and edit the document, and they can also choose to save the document with or without a password. And they can publish the password - so better choose a new password each time.

A password protection does not protect against deleting, renaming or copying the document using a system file manager. Copies will be protected by the same password as the original file.

Cnyptognaphic Methods

Thank you for reading so much text. Want some fun? Copy the text to OpenOffice.org Writer, then replace all letters "l" by the letter "n", for example. Read loud to your family or friends. The first one laughing must stand up on one leg and spell the word "cnyptognaphic".

Warning: This encrypted encoding from words to sound can permanently irritate persons or pets in the room.

Help for the OpenOffice.org office suite is available in many ways. Every user who seeks some help can find a method that fits best.

• First, there is the classical installed Help. You know, just press the F1 key, or click any of the Help buttons.

  This once was called "Online Help" because it was available immediately, without any waiting time. And this is still true. By now the word "online" changed its meaning. It is used now for something that is available on the web or by e-mail. And OpenOffice.org offers a lot of online help, too.

• The web based Help has an overview page at documentation.openoffice.org. From here, links lead to the special pages, as FAQ, How-To, PDF manuals, and more. Many links go to the Wiki pages, where you can read, edit and write helpful information.

• The Wiki page at http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation presents links to the following helpful sections:

  • User Guides for OpenOffice.org 3

  • User Guides for OpenOffice.org 2

  • Frequently Asked Questions

  • SysAdmin/Developer Guides

  • Reference Lists

  • How Tos

  • Tutorials and Screencasts

• Another way to ask for Help is by e-mail. The mailing lists are "run" by other OpenOffice.org users who voluntarily spend their time and energy to answer all questions. So please ask politely and try to give all necessary information, for example, which version of OpenOffice.org you are using, and on which operation system.

  • users@openoffice.org is the main list for questions and answers

  • discuss@openoffice.org should be used for discussions about OpenOffice.org

  • dev@openoffice.org is the list to ask about developers' questions

  • An overview of the main e-mail lists is here: http://www.openoffice.org/mail_list.html

• If you want to ask your question on a web forum, where other users of the software will give their answers, browse to http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/

• And don't forget to read the pages of all the enthusiastic OpenOffice.org users on the web, who provide tutorials, how-to instructions, and much more. For example, the pages of Solveig Haugland (link in the right column of this blog) are much recommended.

• More Help is available, PDF files and printed books, tutorials, videos. Use your favorite search engine, include your search words and the word OpenOffice.org, to find the answers.

We always want to learn how we can improve the Help. If you have ideas, please subscribe to the documentation mail list at dev@documentation.openoffice.org and discuss your ideas.

When you enter text into a Calc cell, the text continues in front of the neighboring cells to the right. Unless there are some contents in one of those cells, in which case the visible text is cut off before it can cover the existing cell contents.

To always be able to see all text contents in a cell, you might want to enable the automatic word wrap feature.

1. Click the cell or select some cells where you want the text to wrap automatically.

2. Choose Format - Cells.

3. Click the Alignment tab.

4. Enable Wrap Text Automatically.

You can also insert line breaks into the cell manually using Ctrl+Return.

1. Double-click a cell to enter text directly into the cell.

2. Press Ctrl+Return to advance the text cursor to the next line in the same cell.

Note that this doesn't work when you enter the text in the Input Line of the Formula Bar.

Some documents can be brushed up by pasting sticky notes on the pages. You can create some nice notes in OpenOffice.org without much effort. Save them in the Gallery, and then later you can easily position them to any place on your pages.

Create a container for the sticky notes:

1. Open the Gallery. It's in Tools > Gallery.

2. Click New Theme... button to create a new theme. Name it "Sticky Notes" for example.

Create some notes:

1. In Writer, click the Show Draw Functions icon on the Standard toolbar.

   The Drawing toolbar opens next to the bottom of the window.

2. Click the Text icon (with the letter T on it). Then drag a rectangle on the page.

3. Enter some text to keep the text box visible. You are in text edit mode now.

4. Click outside the text box to leave text edit mode.

5. Click the text once. Now the text box is selected as an object. You see eight handles to move and scale the text box.

6. Right-click inside the text box to open the context menu.

7. Choose Area to edit the area properties. For example, you can apply a solid yellow color, or a color gradient.

You can also apply a shadow and transparency to the area and the shadow.

Choose the Line command in the context menu to set the border properties.

Choose the Text command in the context menu to define some spacing between text and borders.

Click outside the text box to leave the selected object.

Double-click the text to edit the text.

Store the sticky note in the Gallery:

Use drag-and-drop to copy the text box into the Gallery. This can be a little bit tricky.

1. First you must click the text box to see the eight handles. When you see the handles you know that the object is selected.

2. When you just click and drag the object, it will not leave the document's pages. So you must click the text box and hold down the mouse button for a second or two without moving the mouse. Then, without letting go of the mouse button, start moving the mouse to the Gallery.
   

3. Now you can release the mouse button to drop the text box into the current theme folder of the Gallery.

Apply a sticky note from the Gallery:

1. With any document open, open the Gallery. Open the Sticky Notes theme.

2. Drag-and-drop a text box (also known as a sticky note now) from the Gallery into the document. No need to wait a second when you drag from the Gallery.

3. Double-click the text box to edit the text. Select the text and choose Format > Character to change the text color or other character properties.

By default, the text box is anchored to the paragraph where you dropped it. You can move the text box to another paragraph, and the anchor will follow. You can also change the text box anchoring to be anchored to the page, or to a character. See the Help for more information about anchors.

Once upon a time there were some little office user. Using office all day long. Exchanging files with other little office users. In those days, only one office program was known, so sharing the files was a real no-brainer.

They all lived in a small village in the middle of Happyland. Then suddenly, from one day to the other, the sharing of files got more complicated. Some little office users had updated versions of the software, some not. Some could afford more expensive computers with yet another version of the software. Now sharing files got complicated, and for some little office users, almost impossible. When they complained, they only were told to pay more money for ever more updates. Buy new software that promised to make their own documents compliant to what they had been before. The little office users grumbled a bit, but as they did not know better, they gave in.

Until:-- one day a strong wind blew a fairy from the nearby open land into their village. It was a free fairy, and she had a magic wand that made the sound of foss, foss, fosssss, whenever she waved the wand.

Well, you kids all know for sure what a kind of free fairy that was. The villagers of Happyland gathered together and listened to the fairy's words. They learned about free and open software, and they wondered how they could have ever lived without. So this fairy story about software ends here.

Wait for more fairies to come.

And they lived happily ever after.

Use the Mouse to Zoom and Scroll

Most users of OpenOffice.org use a mouse device with a scroll wheel.

• You can turn this scroll wheel up and down to scroll the OpenOffice.org document window up and down.

  But there is more to the scroll wheel than vertically scrolling.

• Hold down the Shift key while turning the scroll wheel, and you will scroll horizontally through your document, from right to left and back.

• Hold down the Ctrl key while turning the scroll wheel to zoom the document window in and out.

The scroll wheel also acts as a third or middle mouse button. In OpenOffice.org, you can select what should happen when you press the middle mouse button:

• Choose Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org - View. Look at the Middle mouse button drop-down list.

You can choose from the three options: No function, Automatic scrolling, Paste clipboard.

When Automatic scrolling is enabled, you click the middle mouse button in a document to see a special icon. This icon looks like a compass rose with four directions. When you now move the mouse, the document scrolls in the same direction. Click any mouse button to exit this scrolling mode.

When Paste clipboard is enabled, a middle mouse click pastes the contents of the " middle mouse clipboard". This is a function that Solaris and Linux users know well, while it may be new to Windows users, where this X Window selection clipboard does not exist. It is a clipboard that always holds the text that was selected last, no matter in which window. Once that last selection gets cleared, the clipboard is cleared, too. This special clipboard lives independently from the "normal" clipboard that you use from the Edit menu or by Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, and Ctrl+X.

All these functions require a mouse device and software that supports these functions. As these functions are not OpenOffice.org functions, you will not see a description in the OpenOffice.org Help.

Most screen displays show more pixels horizontally than vertically. Some are widescreen displays in landscape mode.

So, if you plan to publish some information to be read on screen, it might be a good idea to use a landscape page format.

And you can apply some appealing colors and other effects to the fonts and to the background. For sure, this depends on the topic and audience of your document. At least it won't cost you more money to publish a colorful PDF than a black and white file.

We can publish Draw documents in PDF format as easy as Writer documents. However, most of us OpenOffice.org users are feeling comfortable using Writer to create our documents.

So, let's start with a new Writer doc.

1. In Writer, choose Format - Page to open the Page Style dialog.

2. On the Page tab page, define a not too large landscape format, and reset all margins to zero. OpenOffice.org warns you that your printer might not be able to print without margins, but we can safely ignore the warning for an on screen PDF file.

   
   

3. On the Background tab page, select a background color. The Chart colors at the end of the list offer a well balanced set of matching colors.

   
   

4. In step 2, we did reset the margins to zero, for a borderless background color. Now we want to claim some text margins back, so that the text stays away from the edges. This can be done by setting a border around the page and then defining a text-to-border spacing. Click the Borders tab.

   
   

5. On the Borders tab page, click the second icon from the left at "Line arrangement - Default". This draws four borders around the page. Then select the same border color that you did set for the background. Finally, add some "spacing to contents".

6. Now you can type some text on your page. To apply the same font effects and color to all paragraphs, you can right-click the text and choose Edit Paragraph Style. Use the Font Effects tab page to define some effects, like Outline and Shadow. Drop Caps might look nice, too.

7. Don't forget to insert some pictures. If you right-click the picture, you can change the anchor and the wrapping of text around the picture, among others. If you set the anchor to Page, it is easy to drag a picture to span two pages.

8. Save the document and click the Export Directly to PDF icon.

Have fun creating your on screen PDF files with OpenOffice.org!

In OpenOffice.org Calc, you sometimes have long lists of values, most of them are zero values. You don't want to see all those "0" cells. You want to see only the valuable values that differ from zero.

Two settings exist that suppress the zero values: one setting is for the on screen view only, and the other setting is for printing only.

To suppress zero values on screen

1. Open a Calc document.

2. Choose Tools – Options – OpenOffice.org Calc – View.

3. Set or reset the Zero values checkbox.

To suppress zero values when printing

1. Open the Calc document.

   Yes, this setting is for the current document only.

2. Choose Format – Page.

3. Open the Sheet tab page.

4. Set or reset the Zero values checkbox.