While you work with OpenOffice.org and find your way through the menus, toolbars, and windows, you most possibly learned to praise the highly useful Navigator window and its companion, the Styles and Formatting window.

The Problem

Unfortunately, those windows sometimes appear at places where they shouldn't, urging you to move them out of the way. See the image, which overplays the problem a little bit because the screen size is so small.

 

The Solution: Docking

You can order your sidekicks to stay near the border of your document window. Several ways to send them off:

• Ctrl+double-click a gray area of the window. For example, the gray area near the icons. This sends the window to one of the borders, where it appears as a docked window.

• Grab the title bar of a window and move it over to any of the four borders. As soon as you see a gray border showing a preview of the new placement, release the mouse button.

Note: This second method only works when your operating system and/or display driver is set up in such a way to show full windows when moving with the mouse. If you only see a wireframe replacement of the window while you move it, then you cannot dock the window with the mouse.

(Sorry for the mousewriting – could not find out how to use the Gimp texttool to type more than just one character)

A Docked Window

Now that the window is docked, it will remember this status. You can enable and disable the Navigator window or the Styles and Formatting window, whichever you docked to the border, using the keyboard shortcuts. Press F5 or F11 respectively.

 

The new border between the docked window and the document is a special tool with different functions:

• Click the Show/Hide icon in the middle of the new border to show or hide the docked window. The window shows up until you close it by clicking the Show/Hide icon again.

• Click the new border, but not the icon in the middle, to show the docked window temporarily. When you click outside the docked window, it hides automatically.

More Docked Windows

When you now grab another window and dock it to the same space (this may require some training), you can even have two or more windows docked next to each other at the same border.

The Conclusion

Ctrl+double-click a gray area in a docked window to convert it back into a standard free window with a title bar.

These free windows aren't bad. They remember the position and size they had the last time.

So you can drag the Navigator window to almost full screen size to get a superb overview of all objects in your document. Press F5 to hide this super window and work on the text, press F5 again for another overview.

Searching the Web From Within OOo

Few users know all of the hidden treasures inside OOo, but today you'll discover one more cool feature.

How about being able to select a word in your Writer text, click a button, and immediately see what your favorite Internet search site knows about that word?

This is cool and easy, and the best: it is already built into your OOo (has been there for ages). All you need is OOo and a default Web browser.

To search the Web

1. Open a Writer document with some text inside.
2. Choose the menu command View - Toolbars - Hyperlink Bar.
3. Select a word or some consecutive text. You see the text in the left text box of the Hyperlink Bar. If you want, you can enter text directly into this text box.
   
4. Click the rightmost icon on the Hyperlink Bar. You see a drop-down list of Internet search sites.
5. Click your favorite site from the list. Your default Web browser opens and displays the answers.

To configure the Search sites

Some sites are already configured. You can change the options, and add more sites.

1. Choose Tools - Options - Internet - Search.
2. Click a control on the right side of the dialog, then click the Help button. Read how to configure new Web sites into this list.
   

Digital Signatures in OOo

You can obtain a certificate from a certification authority to sign your documents.

By signing an OOo document with your digital signature, you can ensure that the person who gets your document can verify the document is still the same version that you saved.

The receiver of your document will see an icon in the Status Bar which confirms “yes, the document is the same as the saved version”.

If you or someone else change the document, the icon will look broken and thus give the information “this document was signed, but now it has been changed from the original version”.

In the OOo Help, you can find a page which describes how to obtain a certificate, and how to digitally sign your OOo documents.

1. Press F1 to open Help.

2. On the Index tab page, enter “digital signature” and double-click the entry.

Another introduction to digital signatures in OOo was published October 12th 2006, by Dmitri Popov on LinuxToday: http://www.linuxtoday.com/security/2006101201426OSHL

Click the Complete Story link to read the fine introduction by Dmitri, and do not hesitate to visit his OOo page at http://www.nothickmanuals.info/doku.php

Starting with OOo 2.0.3, a new Export feature was introduced to simplify the deployment of BASIC code for all users who share the same installation.

1. Open the BASIC Macro Organizer and create a new BASIC library (choose "Tools - Macros - Organize Macros - OOo BASIC", then click Organizer, then click Libraries tab, then click New). Enter a name for your library.
   
2. Click Edit and write your BASIC code.
3. Again open the Macro Organizer, then click the new Export button to export your BASIC code as a UNO extension file (formerly known as a UNO package)

Now every user can choose "Tools - Package Manager" (which will later be called Extension Manager) to add the new file to the user's installation. But with many users on a shared installation, it is more comfortable when the Admin starts unopkg to install the extension for all users.

1. Become root user with write permission for the shared installation of OOo.
2. In a terminal window, CD to {install_dir}/program and enter the following command
   
3. unopkg add --shared path_to_UNO_extension_file/UNO_extension_filename
   

Note: The Export button is new in OOo 2.0.3. It is only activated for your own libraries.
Call unopkg without parameter for a short help.

We all know that Sun Support  also supports OpenOffice.org users (if they want to pay for the professional support).
But the OOo community has some more support offerings of their own. And that support is free of charge for everyone. Perhaps, if you see how well it works, you'll decide you want to pay back something to the community, let's say you give some advice to others on the mail list, but that depends on your own decision.
The following list gives only some of the entry points for OOo support.

http://documentation.openoffice.org/ is the documentation project home page with links to the mail list, documents, tutorials and more.

http://oooauthors.org/ is another site where authors of helpful documentation meet.

http://www.oooforum.org/ is a Web forum with questions and answers.

Several language projects have developed wonderful Web sites that are worth browsing if you can read the language. For example, the german project maintains the site http://de.openoffice.org/, and the french project can be found at http://fr.openoffice.org/.