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.

Expand and Configure your OOo

You can add new features to your copy of OpenOffice.org anytime. It is about as easy as adding an extension to your Firefox browser or to your Thunderbird mail client.

Some available extensions to OOo are the following files:

• Sun Weblog Publisher (from the Sun Store)

• Professional Template Pack (from Sun Store)

You may think of other useful and cool extensions you want to use within your OOo. For example, when there is a Weblog Publisher, why not also have a Wiki Publisher? Or how about getting nice images that are automatically added to the Gallery, or a set of macros together with a new toolbar to translate your documents into other languages? You imagine a new feature, ask about it in the mailing lists, and someone will (hopefully) perform the coding and offer the results to the public.

Creation and packaging of such extensions will be easy in the future, when intuitive tools will be available. As an author of OOo Help, I'm looking forward to the new Help extensions that might see the break of dawn some day. These extensions should make it very easy for everyone to enhance and add to the built-in Help of OOo.

OOo is as open to new extensions as it can be.

Open Tools - Extension Manager (formerly known as Package Manager) and click the Help button to read more about extensions.

Customize OOo

Without knowing much about programming, you can still enhance and transform your copy of OOo using the Tools - Customize dialogs. You can add your own submenus, toolbars, and key commands.

If you know how to write or record some macros within OOo, you can add those macros as icons to a toolbar or create some menu commands that call those new macros. If you want, you can also use the Events tab page of the Customize dialog to link your macros to events like "Starting OOo" or "Opening a document". There is even a dialog editor where you can design your own dialogs with all the usual controls. Choose Tools - Macros - Organize Dialogs, and then click New to create a new Basic dialog.

In the future it will be easy to create a new extension from your customized elements, so that you can hand out your new improvements to all other users of OOo.