OpenOffice.org Help TNT: Tips'n'Tricks that somehow didn't make it to the help (yet).

From time to time you may want to publish a document, like meeting minutes, in read-only mode, so that the document is protected against any accidential changes. With OpenOffice.org you have several different special options to publish your document.

Set the "Open this document in read-only mode" option

This option protects the document against accidential changes by the reader. It is easy for anyone to remove the protection and change the contents.

1. Choose Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org - Security.

2. Enable Open this document in read-only mode.

3. Click OK.

4. Save the document.

This option is saved as an internal flag in the document file. When you or another user opens the document with the OpenOffice.org software, the document is in read-only mode. The text (read-only) is appended to the document name in the title bar. This also applies to copies of the document that you create by your system's file manager.

The user cannot edit the document, but the user can click the Edit File icon on the Standard toolbar. This resets the document into normal mode with full editing features. If the user saves the document, overwriting the original file, then the read-only flag is gone and the original contents might be changed.

Save the document as a template

This option protects the document against accidential changes by the reader. On normal opening the "protection" gets removed automatically and the user can change the contents, but only in a copy of the original template document. It is not easily possible to change the original file by accident.

1. Choose File - Save as when you are ready to save the document as a template.

2. Open the File type drop-down list and select ODF Text Document Template (.ott).

3. Enter a name for the template file and click Save.

The text document template gets an extension of .ott. When a user opens the file in OpenOffice.org Writer, a copy of the document is created automatically with the name "Untitled N", where N is a number. The user can edit the contents and save the document as a normal text document with an extension of .odt. The template file remains unchanged on the disk.

Only when the user chooses to save as a template and to overwrite the original template file using the original name, then the original gets changed. This will not happen accidentially.

Set file permissions

This option can protect the document file against overwriting by all users or by users who do not belong to your group. It can even prohibit reading by users. The operating system cares for what is allowed and what is not.

1. Save the document as a normal file.

2. Open the file manager of your operating system, or a terminal or shell window, and set the file permissions.

A user with the right permissions can open the file for reading and/or writing. If the user can only read the file, the document shows (read-only) behind its name in the OpenOffice.org Writer title bar.

The user can click the Edit File icon. A dialog tells the user that the original file cannot be changed and offers to open a copy with the name "Untitled N" for editing. It is not possible for a user without write permissions to overwrite, delete or rename the original file. I haven't tested what happens after copying the file to other folders or other operating systems though.

Publish as PDF

This option creates a file that normally will open in a read-only software without editing capability. You can also publish your Writer document as HTML, and a web browser would open the document. But the PDF normally preserves the original layout better than an HTML file. A user needs special software to edit the PDF document's contents.

• Export the document to PDF. Do any of the following:

• Click the Export Directly as PDF icon on the Standard toolbar, or

• Choose File - Export as PDF. This opens a dialog with more options.

The reader of your document does not need a version of OpenOffice.org to read the contents.

What I like with PDF or HTML documents: I can browse through pages using the spacebar. This should really be possible in Writer, too, when the document is in read-only mode. May be some day in the future OOo gets a browse mode?

Signing a document

There is only one way to guarantee that the document's contents are still original and not changed by any other person. The author must digitally sign the document. This adds some additional information to the document file.

When OpenOffice.org opens a signed original document, it displays a green Signed icon on the Status bar. The user can edit the document, however, but any editing action would invalidate the signature. The green icon turns red immediately.

It might be possible to set a document to open in read-only mode and then to sign it. This would make it less likely that the reader accidentially invalidates the signature.

1. Get a certificate for signing documents. The OpenOffice.org Help has all the necessary information: search for "certifications" or "signing documents".

2. Choose File - Save to save your document as a file.

3. Choose File - Digital Signatures and add your signature.

Save with a password

While "Publish as PDF" is well suited for a document to be published, the "Save with password" option is best to protect against publishing the document contents. OpenOffice.org uses a very strong password protection method, so a user will definitely need the correct password to open the document. If the password is chosen well (long enough, not a word from any dictionary of the world, etc), then it is almost impossible to see the contents without knowing the password.

You can save a document with a password. Check the option in the File-Save dialog. Then publish the document on your web space or hand out copies of the document to your audience. Give the password that is needed to open the document only to those users who are allowed to open the document. They can read and edit the document, and they can also choose to save the document with or without a password. And they can publish the password - so better choose a new password each time.

A password protection does not protect against deleting, renaming or copying the document using a system file manager. Copies will be protected by the same password as the original file.

Cnyptognaphic Methods

Thank you for reading so much text. Want some fun? Copy the text to OpenOffice.org Writer, then replace all letters "l" by the letter "n", for example. Read loud to your family or friends. The first one laughing must stand up on one leg and spell the word "cnyptognaphic".

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.

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 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!

Many hidden treasures are slumbering beyond the menus of OOo. If you only scan the menu bar for those features you're searching for, you'll find at most 10% of them.

Well, you can argue the exact percentage, but I'm quite sure that you will miss a lot if you never explore beyond the obvious menu commands.

• Some dialogs and wizards will only show up on some actions, as with drag-and-drop from Calc to Base.

• Some cool features are only part of context menus, like the Arrange, Align, Flip, and Convert commands in Impress.

• And some useful things can be inserted into your documents, but they never show up as commands in the Insert menu. Such are the Push Buttons and other Form Controls.

Let's take an intuitive beginner's approach to explore the power of Form Controls. Or to scratch the surface of Push Buttons.

To insert an action button to open another document

You want to add a new button to your document. When you click that button, OOo will start some action, for example, open a certain document in addition to the current document. I chose this example because this is a built-in action, so it's an easy first start.

1. Open a new Writer text document. Optionally type some text.

2. Choose View - Toolbars - Form Controls.

   You see the Form Controls toolbar. As with most other toolbars, you can drag the toolbar to other places, dock and undock it to the document borders, and reshape it to show more rows or more columns of icons. And you can click the down arrow in the title bar to open a menu. The Visible Buttons command shows a nice overview of the available icons with their names.

3. 
   On the Form Controls toolbar, click the Push Button icon. (Do not click the Push Button command in the Visible Buttons menu: this would hide the icon from the toolbar!)

4. Drag a rectangle of the position and size of the push button, then release the mouse button.

5. Right-click the new push button and choose Control from the context menu. This opens one of the two main properties windows.

6. 
   Click the Action list button and select "Open document/web page" from the list.

7. The URL text field is now enabled. Click the … button next to the URL text field to select the document that should be opened when a user clicks the button.

That's it. You have created your first action push button. However, we are not finished yet.

• Currently the button is labeled "Button". Select the text in the Label text field and enter a more descriptive text, like "Open Memo Doc".

Currently the document is set to design mode. When you click the button, it gets eight handles to resize the button, and you can change the button's properties. In order to use the push button, you must leave the design mode. There are two ways to leave the design mode:

• Click the Design Mode On/Off icon on the Form Controls toolbar. You can immediately test the actions of your form controls. Don't forget to save your document before you test the actions. May be the action is defined to quit the current document.

• Save the document and open it again. By default a document with form controls is opened in "action mode", not in design mode. You can change this, of course.

To create an action button to close the current document

Now you know how to create a working push button. However, not all actions are listed in the Actions list box. If you want to define the action to close the current document, you would need a macro that does just that. Then you assign that macro to the push button.

Intuitively, you might want to use the built-in macro recorder of OpenOffice.org. But that is not a good idea when you try to record the "Close this document" action, because that also closes the macro recorder.

So the next choice is to search the web for "OpenOffice.org macro to close the current document". Some minutes later, you find this command:

StarDesktop.CurrentComponent.CurrentController.Frame.close( true )

1. In your web browser or wherever you found the macro, select the macro and copy it to the clipboard.

2. Open the Writer document where you want to create a Close push button.

3. Choose Tools - Macros - Organize Macros - OpenOffice.org Basic.

   This opens the Macros dialog.

4. Click Edit.

   This opens the Basic IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

5. Paste the macro command between the Sub and End Sub statements as follows. Rename the Sub Main to another meaningful name like Sub close_current:

6. 
   Close the Basic IDE. OOo saves your macro automatically.

Next, you create a push button as outlined above in steps 1 to 5.

1. Right-click the button and choose Control to open the Properties window.

2. Click the Events tab on top of the Properties window.

   You see the Events tab page, where you can assign macros to all possible button events.

3. 
   Normally, a button responds to a mouse click when you release the mouse button. So you assign the close_current macro to that event. Click the … icon next to "Mouse button released".

4. You see the Assign Action dialog. Click the Macro button on top right.

5. You see the Macro Selector dialog. Click to open the path "My Macros - Standard - Module1". Now you can select the close_current macro and click OK.

Almost finished. You have written the close_current macro in the Basic IDE, then you have assigned the macro to the "release mouse button" event of your own push button. Not bad for a beginner!

Again, you may want to change the Label of the button to some meaningful text like "Close this doc".

And do not forget to save the document before you try out the Close button in action mode.

Q: Are my text files, spreadsheets, and presentations secure when I use OpenOffice.org?

A: Yes. OpenOffice.org is one of the software suites that use an open, international standard for saving files. The standard is called ODF ( Open Document Format). Being an international standard, you can be sure that you will be able to open the files you save today even in many many years from now.

Some other file formats that are still in use today do not offer you this standard conformity. Data that you save in those other formats may be no longer accessible to you when you decide to not pay for the latest software updates, or when you want to use another computer platform.

Q: Can I password-protect my files so no one can look what's inside?

A: Yes. Check the Save with Password box on the File Save dialog, then enter a password with at least five characters. Be very sure to remember that password when you later try to open the file again! OpenOffice.org uses a strong data encryption. In theory, it may be possible to break the password using brute-force methods, that means, to try and try and try with all possible passwords until the file opens. But with the strong OOo encryption, even the fastest computers will need many years to succeed.

Some other office suites also use passwords to secure the contents, but their encryption algorithm is supposed to be much less secure that the one used in OpenOffice.org.

Q: How can the encryption be secure when the program code is made public?

A: Modern computer software uses modern cryptographic methods that are published as common knowledge. The file contents are encrypted using the supplied password, and the file can only be decrypted using the same password. With open source software like OpenOffice.org, every programmer can verify that there is no more magic than this.

With some other software that is proprietary, when even trying to decompile the software to have a look what is inside is prohibited by legal or technical means, you cannot be so sure that your data is really safe from spying eyes.

Q: But I found out how to view a password protected spreadsheet without using the password, and it was easy.

A: The cell protection of a spreadsheet is only a tool to prevent the contents from occasional changes. Have a look at the OpenOffice.org application help: Open a Calc spreadsheet, press F1, look for the index entry "protected contents". There you find an explanation about the different security levels and various methods to protect contents in OOo.

If you want to really protect your spreadsheet, use the Save with Password check box on the File Save dialog. Of course, this strong protection only works when you save in ODF file formats.

Q: Must I be afraid of macros inside the documents that I receive?

A: Use common sense and there is nothing to be worried about.

OpenOffice.org (if built by Sun Microsystems and downloaded from OpenOffice.org) will not execute any macro that may be waiting inside a Word or Excel file. You are safe to open the file. If you want you can look into the macros inside the file, if you want you can delete them, and you can save the file with or without the macros. It's your choice.

OpenOffice.org will not execute any macro that is inside its own ODF file format by default. Except macros from trusted sources. You can define which sources you trust. Open Tools - OpenOffice.org - Security, then click on Macro Security (see image).

With OpenOffice.org, security is right at your hands.