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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
