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.

Exploring hidden features of OpenOffice.org, part III.

Using OpenOffice.org you can print large line art on a quilt-like set of pages, as we found out last week in http://blogs.sun.com/oootnt/entry/drawing_large_posters. We just did set the desired output size, and OpenOffice.org automatically took care of the hard work how to distribute everything on the sheets of paper.

Now let's try to print many pages of a document on just one sheet of paper. This is really easy, and again OpenOffice.org cares for most of the work. You just design the layout of how many columns and rows of pages you want to be printed on one page of paper.

This blog covers how to print a Writer doc.

1. Load your Writer document.

2. Choose File - Page Preview.

3. Click the Page Preview: Multiple Pages icon on the Page Preview toolbar. Setup the columns and rows to show on screen. This step is optional, just to show the arrangement of pages.

4. Click the Print options page view icon. Setup the columns and rows to print on one page of paper.

5. Click the Print page view icon.

Ready. Your printer outputs a nice overview of four pages next to each other.

Exploring hidden features of OpenOffice.org, part II.

Today we will create a seven feet by seven feet poster in Draw and print this using normal letter paper.

Well, that would certainly need much more than 100 sheets of paper and a lot of precious ink, so we'll restrict the poster size to span four sheets of paper, just for this exercise. In OpenOffice.org Draw 3, the maximum paper size is set to 3m x 3m. In full color, you will soon run out of ink. But thin line art would not need so much ink. Look at this real world example: http://openoffice.exblog.jp/7614509/

Imagine you want to paint some comic characters to a wall of your living room. You can create the line art in Draw. To print the comic without emptying your wallet for new ink, remove all fill colors and set the line width of the remaining outline lines to a small value. Print the line art, glue the paper sheets to the wall, let them dry. Or ask your great grand mother for a sewing pattern copy tool that can copy the lines through the sheets onto the wallpaper. Then use a really big brush and some inexpensive wall colors to paint the wall.

Attention, kids, please ask your parents before you start!

So, first you define the paper size to be as large as you want the final painting to be.

1. Open a new Draw document, choose Format - Page.

2. Set the paper format to the width and height of the final painting.

For this example, we chose landscape orientation and entered 16" width and 12" height. If you want 40 cm each, you can enter that into the box, together with the measurements.

3. Now draw your line art.

For this example, we inserted a rectangle, removed the fill color, and set the line width to 0.06". Then we rotated the rectangle to some degrees, so that we can more easily see how well the final pages will fit together.

The rotation tool is still selected, down there on the Drawing toolbar.

By the way, this blog image shows StarOffice 9.0, which uses the same program code as OpenOffice.org 3.0. You see the tilted rectangle with jagged lines on screen, but it will print much better. Later on, that is in OpenOffice.org 3.1 or so, it is planned to have an anti-aliased screen display, so that the screen looks much better, too.

4. When your line art is finished, choose File - Print.

If your printer is set up to print double-sided, you would want to change the properties temporarily to print single-sided. Click OK.

OpenOffice.org knows that your printer cannot print on such paper size, so it asks how to continue.

5. Check "Print on multiple pages" and click OK. For the example, your printer should output approximately four sheets of paper. This depends on how large your rectangle is, how much you tilted the rectangle, and of course on the paper size inside the printer.

6. Arrange the paper sheets in the right order and glue them together as needed.

Happy drawing!

Obama missing in Help

Late reports came to our attention that the installed OpenOffice.org Help does not cover any message from or about Barack Obama.

We regret this and want to express our hope that you will still press F1 whenever you are in need of OOo Help. We can help you. Yes, we can.

In OOo Writer, you can define spacing above and below paragraphs, and you can set a line spacing between the lines of a paragraph. As with other formatting attributes, you can apply them to the selected paragraphs as direct formatting, or you can change the Paragraph Styles.

Look at the default paragraphs in the following image:

Line spacing

If you want a 1.5 line spacing for the second paragraph, you can right-click somewhere inside the second paragraph to open the context menu. Then choose the formatting attribute of your choice from the menu. See the following image, where the new 1.5 line spacing is already applied:

As you can see, the 1.5 line spacing is created by adding 50 percent more interline lead than normal, below every line of the paragraph, including the last line.

The command in the context menu applied a direct formatting. The same is true for the optional toolbar icons on the Formatting toolbar, and for the Indents & Spacing dialog box from the Format - Paragraph menu. All direct formattings can be reset by the Default Formatting command, as the following image shows:

Here a right-click in the second paragraph opened the context menu, and the Default Formatting command did reset the direct formatting of that paragraph.

Further down in the context menu, you can find the Edit Paragraph Style command. If you change the Paragraph Style to apply formats, you can change many paragraphs at the same time, in the same manner. All paragraphs in our example text document have the same Paragraph Style named Default. You can see the name Default near the left edge of the Status Bar below the document. When you change attributes of the Paragraph Style, all paragraphs in our document will show the changes.

Choose Edit Paragraph Style from the context menu and go to the Indents & Spacing tab page. See the following image:

Here you can change the formatting attributes for the Default style (see the dialog's title bar). Select a double line spacing and click OK. As you can see, there are some more choices for different line spacing options in the dialog box. The OOo Help tells you about the meaning of the other options.

When you now try to reset the formatting to the default, using the Default Formatting command from the context menu, you will not see any difference. That is because the Default Formatting command resets the formatting to those values that are defined by the current Paragraph Style. And you just changed that style.

To reset all changes that you made to the Default style, click the Standard button in the Paragraph Style: Default dialog box as shown in the above image.

Spacing between Paragraphs

You can also set the spacing above and below paragraphs. You either change that formatting for all currently selected paragraphs directly (use Format - Paragraph menu), or you change the Paragraph Style as in the above image.

If you sometimes still have to work with proprietary documents, for example Microsoft doc files, you may notice some differences how paragraph spacing is done in OOo versus Microsoft Word.

For example, the spacing above a paragraph is not applied in Microsoft Word for a paragraph on top of a page. In Writer, that paragraph keeps its spacing above.

When paragraphs have a spacing above and a spacing below assigned, you will see another difference. OOo Writer adds both spacings together, while Microsoft Word just applies the bigger one of both spacings.

Two different worlds with different history. For compatibility reasons, you can choose how Writer applies those spacings. Open a Writer document, then choose Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org Writer - Compatibility. You see the dialog box as in the following image:

By default, all options are set to ensure the best compatibility within the OpenOffice.org text document formats, past and present. If you open a Microsoft Word document and the paragraph spacings look odd, you might want to change some options for the current document.

OpenOffice.org does the best it can to bridge the gap between the different types of text documents, you can open and save the proprietary Microsoft documents, and you can fine-tune a lot of compatibility and formatting options.