Thursday May 14, 2009

Some documents can be brushed up by pasting sticky notes on the pages. You can create some nice notes in OpenOffice.org without much effort. Save them in the Gallery, and then later you can easily position them to any place on your pages.


Create a container for the sticky notes:

  1. Open the Gallery. It's in Tools > Gallery.

  2. Click New Theme... button to create a new theme. Name it "Sticky Notes" for example.

Create some notes:

  1. In Writer, click the Show Draw Functions icon on the Standard toolbar.

    The Drawing toolbar opens next to the bottom of the window.

  2. Click the Text icon (with the letter T on it). Then drag a rectangle on the page.

  3. Enter some text to keep the text box visible. You are in text edit mode now.

  4. Click outside the text box to leave text edit mode.

  5. Click the text once. Now the text box is selected as an object. You see eight handles to move and scale the text box.

  6. Right-click inside the text box to open the context menu.

  7. Choose Area to edit the area properties. For example, you can apply a solid yellow color, or a color gradient.


You can also apply a shadow and transparency to the area and the shadow.

Choose the Line command in the context menu to set the border properties.

Choose the Text command in the context menu to define some spacing between text and borders.

Click outside the text box to leave the selected object.

Double-click the text to edit the text.

Store the sticky note in the Gallery:

Use drag-and-drop to copy the text box into the Gallery. This can be a little bit tricky.

  1. First you must click the text box to see the eight handles. When you see the handles you know that the object is selected.

  2. When you just click and drag the object, it will not leave the document's pages. So you must click the text box and hold down the mouse button for a second or two without moving the mouse. Then, without letting go of the mouse button, start moving the mouse to the Gallery.

  3. Now you can release the mouse button to drop the text box into the current theme folder of the Gallery.

Apply a sticky note from the Gallery:

  1. With any document open, open the Gallery. Open the Sticky Notes theme.

  2. Drag-and-drop a text box (also known as a sticky note now) from the Gallery into the document. No need to wait a second when you drag from the Gallery.

  3. Double-click the text box to edit the text. Select the text and choose Format > Character to change the text color or other character properties.

By default, the text box is anchored to the paragraph where you dropped it. You can move the text box to another paragraph, and the anchor will follow. You can also change the text box anchoring to be anchored to the page, or to a character. See the Help for more information about anchors.




This blog copyright 2009 by fpe