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.