You can write text in columns using any one of the following options:

• Set the page format to columns

• Insert a section with columns

  • Text fills all columns to the same height

  • Text fills first column, then flows into next column

• Use a multi-column table

• Use text frames or linked text frames

Each option has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Set the page format to columns

This looks like the most obvious choice if you need columns on several pages.

To apply columns to the current page style:

• Choose Format – Page – Columns.

This however changes the current page style, which most often will be the "Default" page style. If you want some other pages without columns, you must know or learn how to apply different page styles in the same document.

To define a new page style with columns:

1. Choose Format – Styles and Formatting to open the Styles and Formatting window.

2. Click the Page Styles button in the Styles and Formatting window.

3. Right-click the Default entry to open the context menu.

4. Choose New...

   
   

5. In the Page Style dialog, type the name of your new page style, for example, Two Columns.

6. In the Next Style list box, select the Two Columns style, or the Default style.

   Choosing the same style as next style will continue this page style for the following pages.

   Choosing another style as next style will define the current page style to span one page only.

7. On the Columns tab, select the columns options. Click OK.

8. Now you can apply the new Two Columns style to the current page range by double-clicking the Two Columns name in the Styles and Formatting window.

   For a definition of page ranges, see "The scope of page ranges" in the blog entry http://blogs.sun.com/oootnt/entry/changing_page_orientation

You see, the obvious and simple way to apply columns is simple only if you want to apply columns to the whole document. Otherwise it turns out to become a difficult multi step instruction. Fortunately, there are other ways to get columns that are much simpler to apply.

Insert a section with columns

To apply columns to a part of a page:

1. Choose Insert – Section.

2. Click the Columns tab page and set the options. Click Insert.

The checkbox "Evenly distribute contents to all columns" is enabled by default. The text will flow into the columns so that they all are filled to the same height. The whole section changes its height accordingly.

If you disable the checkbox, text flows into the first column of the section. The section grows down until it reaches the lower page margin. Only then the text will flow into the next column.

You can press the column break key, Ctrl+Shift+Return, to manually jump to the next column. This does the same for columns that the page break key, Ctrl+Return, does for pages.

Use a multi-column table

For some applications you may prefer to insert a multi-column table and enter your text into the cells.

The table offers some formatting features that you may prefer. For example, it is easy to drag-and-drop the cell and table borders to resize the columns. Different backgrounds to the cells are possible, and other options.

Use text frames or linked text frames

This is another option that can be helpful for newsletters, for example. You can read about linked frames in this blog entry: http://blogs.sun.com/oootnt/entry/text_boxes_in_writer_documents and of course the installed application Help has some helpful advice, too.

Tip: before you decide which method to use for your columns in a long document, you may want to test the results of all output options first. Some methods for columns will export to PDF or to HTML better than others.

A: Look here, darling, I've got something to tell you right now, and it is of highest priority.

B: You make me curious. Continue.

A: I've found some reasons to feel some affection towards you.

B: Can you be more precise in this statement, please?

A: I've found four reasons to feel an affection towards you increased up to 100 percent.

B: Go ahead ...

A: These are the reasons, in order from top to bottom:

1. You look so beautiful.
2. You give me reason to live.
3. I get excited when I think of you.
4. We can exchange more than words.

B: This is a numbered list, shouldn't it be a bullet list?

A: You're right as always, darling. I love the way you edit my words right out of my mouth.

B: Thank you for saying that. Al least you got the punctuation right. But you could have read the Sun Editorial Style Guide, Chapter 3, and follow that advice.

A: You're welcome, darling - better I wake up now.

This can happen to a tech writer when mixing up the following:

• reviewing a newly written Sun book all day long
• reading High Fidelity by Nick Hornby late at night
• trying to live a personal life, as much as possible, if possible at all

OpenOffice.org contains many useful features designed to simplify your office tasks. One of those features is the quick and easy drawing of text tables.

Imagine you write a text and need a table with three columns, the first column narrow, the other two wide. You can start drawing that table without the need to reach for the mouse, search that icon, or drag the borders between the columns. Just enter a line like this:

+------+-----------------------+-------------------------+

The very moment that you press Enter at the end of this line, it gets converted into a table, where the plus characters are turned into vertical borders.

(Note that the html format has its own mind where the column borders should be. In Writer they are where you placed the plus characters.)

If that conversion doesn't happen, you might have disabled this feature in the past. Enable "Create table" in Tools - AutoCorrect - Options. Check that Format - AutoFormat - While Typing is enabled, too.

Start the initial line with some space characters to create a table that begins at some distance from the page margin.

While you are in the Tools - AutoCorrect - Options dialog, click the Help button to see what else is available that can automatically change your text.

Several options control the printed output of your Calc spreadsheets. Some of the default settings have been changed for the next OOo 2.3 version.

One remark first: in a Writer text document, you normally observe that each page on screen will be printed on one page of paper. This is how Writer is designed to work. But this is not how Calc is designed to work.

A Calc document can contain several sheets with data. Each sheet can be much bigger than you would want to print on one page of paper. So you are in control to specify what to print and what not to print. Calc has all the controls ready that you need to finetune printing.

Another remark: the Export to PDF feature works basically the same as printing. The settings for printing will be also the settings for the exported PDF file.

To print the current sheet

To print all data cells from the current sheet, just execute the Print command.

If your data covers many pages of paper, you can setup properties like the page order or scaling:

Choose Format – Page and click the Sheet tab.

If there are some large gaps between your data cells that would result in empty pages to be output from the printer, don't worry. You can select to suppress empty pages when printing in two similar looking dialog boxes. To suppress empty pages from printing is a new default setting in OOo 2.3.

• To change the default for all print jobs, choose Tools – Options – OOo Calc – Print.

• To change the setting for just one print job, choose File – Print, then click the Options button.

In addition, the Print only selected sheets option is now enabled by default. The selected sheet is normally the one you are watching on screen. You can click another sheet tab in the lower left corner of the Calc screen to make that the selected sheet. The selected sheet tab is highlighted.

To select multiple sheets, hold down Ctrl while you click the tabs. But be aware that when you select multiple sheets and enter some data into a cell, the same data will be entered on all selected sheets. You may want this to save some time, or you may hate this if you do not know this feature.

To preview the print output on screen

There are two different windows where you can preview the printing output.

• Choose View – Page Break Preview to open an interactive window where you can see and change the data that will be printed on each page of paper.

In this window, you can see the page breaks as blue lines. You can grab a blue line and move it to set the page break to a new position. The scaling will be set automatically to print the data.

Choose View – Normal to get back to the normal Calc window.

• Choose File – Page Preview to see the same preview that you may already know from Writer documents.

Unlike in Writer, the page preview of Calc does not offer too many options, so we'll click the Close Preview button to go back to the normal document view.

To print a range of cells

If you always want to print only selected cells, you can define those cells to be part of a print range.

1. Select all cells that are to be printed.

2. Choose Format – Print Ranges – Define.

You can visually add another print range on a sheet or change the print ranges on the Page Break Preview.

1. Choose View – Page Break Preview.

2. Select some cells.

3. Right-click to open the context menu and choose your command.

Now when you print or export to PDF, you see only the cells from the print range. If your print range spans multiple sheets, by default you now see only the cells from the selected sheet or sheets (see the “Print only selected sheets” option mentioned above).

To print only some pages of paper

You may want to print only some pages of paper. For example, when you want to print all the odd numbered pages first, then flip over the paper sheets and reinsert them into the printer to print the even numbered pages on the other side.

• Choose File – Print, then select All, Pages, or Selection.

The range of printed output  that you select here is the last filter in the chain. When you select All, you will get all the pages according to the other settings of print ranges, suppressed pages, and selected sheets. The printed pages are numbered from 1 to n.

Enter a list of page numbers to print only the pages with the numbers you enter, from all the content that you have defined by "selected sheets" and "print ranges".

When you suppress some empty pages, this will change the numbers of the printed pages that follow the empty pages. So when you enter something like 4-6  in the Pages box, the printer will print the pages 4, 5, and 6 from the current "All" pile of pages.

When you select some cells from your sheet and click Selection in the Print dialog box, this will override any defined print range.

Using OpenOffice.org to write your MediaWiki articles

Did you know that there is an export filter for OpenOffice that you can use to convert your Writer documents to MediaWiki text?

The filter is an XSLT that converts your document from ODT to plain text with MediaWiki markup. It works best if you use styles properly throughout your document.

1. Download and save this file (right-click and Save As):

   http://www.openoffice.org/nonav/issues/showattachment.cgi/45498/odt2wiki.xslt

2. Start OpenOffice.org

3. Select Tools > XML Filter Settings

4. Click the New button and in the General tab, fill in the form as shown:

5. Click the Transformation tab.

6. Click the Browse button for the XSLT for export .

7. Browse to where you saved the XSLT in step 1. Click Open . You should see something similar to this:

8. Click OK , and then Close the XML Filter Settings window.

Now you can use the export filter to save your ODF files as MediaWiki formatted text. To export, all you need to do is:

• Open your Writer document (or create a new one)

• Click File > Export , and select ODT2Wiki from the File format drop down box.

• Give it a filename (and a location) and click Export .

The output will be a plain text file with MediaWiki markup. You can simply paste the text direct into the MediaWiki edit box.

There are a few things that you should be aware of.

• Images do not convert. You will have to add them to the Wiki page separately.

• Long documents (for example documents over 25 pages) do not convert well. Although, depending on your computer, you may have some success with longer documents, I recommend converting long documents in smaller chunks.

• Documents with complicated layouts may not convert perfectly, especially if you have complex tables or complex lists. Make sure you double check the results in the Wiki.

This XSLT filter is also documented on the OpenOffice Wiki at: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Odt2Wiki

Background

Conditional text can be very useful when working on documents that are to be published to multiple audiences.

For example, you could create a letter template that contains different text depending on the language or recipient country.
In OpenOffice.org, you can relate the visibility of sections to certain conditions.

Example

You are running WorldWide Conditions Inc, a small but exquisite start-up that has just opened an office in Germany to expand to the old European market. You would like to use one template for both countries letters, but the US and German offices use different letter heads.

This example neglects the fact that the US and Germany use different paper formats, too. These cannot be conditionally set on a document. Well actually, they could with a little macro logic, but this is beyond the scope of this posting and may be a topic for a later one.

You can create a template that contains both versions and switch the versions by specifying the language of the letter being either EN (for English) or DE (for Deutsch). Here is how:

Note: This is my first attempt with wink and flash animations. It's far from being as nice and nifty as the stuff our media design gurus are able to produce. So bear with me.

Referencing Cells in Calc

If you are working on a spreadsheet containing multiple sheets that all share a common set of categories as a first column, and these category titles may change with time, you don't need to modify them on each and every sheet, just use cell references.

Background

Cell References in OpenOffice.org Calc have the following general syntax:

FILENAME#SHEETNAME.CELLADDRESS

with

• FILENAME being the name of the file that contains the value to be referenced
• SHEETNAME being the name of the sheet in that file that contains the value to be referenced
• CELLADDRESS being the name of the cell that contains the value to be referenced
  

If you are referencing within the same file, the FILENAME# part is optional, if you are referencing within the same sheet, the SHEETNAME. part is optional, too.

Example

On Sheet1, Mary had a little lamb, and you would like Mary to have a little lamb on Sheet2, too:

Go to Sheet2, click on the first cell and insert the magic formula:

=Sheet1.A1

telling Calc to insert a reference to cell A1 on Sheet1 in the current document. That cell says Mary and so does this cell after entering the formula. But as you can see on its formula bar, it just points to cell A1 on Sheet1 and displays its content:

Now for the rest of the rows, you don't need to enter the formula again. Just select the range of cells:

and select " Edit - Fill - Down" from the main menu to let OpenOffice.org fill the cell contents for you:

Now, if you decide that Mary should rather have a cow, she'll have it on all referenced sheets as well:

You can customize the OOo user interface in many ways. In today's tip you see how to add a word count icon to the main Writer toolbar.

1. Click the Down Arrow icon at the far right of the Formatting toolbar.

2. In the icon's menu, choose Customize Toolbar.

3. Click Add.

   You see the Add Commands dialog.

4. In the left list click Options, then in the right list scroll down and click Word Count.

5. Click Add, then click Close.

   Now you already see the new command as a text entry on the toolbar. You can select the new command and click the Up and Down buttons to change the position on the toolbar.

To assign an icon to the new command, select the new command, then click Modify and choose Change Icon.

Most users of OpenOffice.org already know that it is easy to change all icons at once, to find a totally new look of their Office. Only few StarOffice users know that they can enjoy an all new icon theme, too.

In OOo, you choose Tools - Options - OOo - View. Here you can select another Icon Style from a list box. Click OK, and you see the new icons immediately.

The supplied icon sets may be different for different distributions of OOo. In my version, I can select from the default set, Industrial, HiContrast, and Crystal.

I like the large icons of the Crystal set, so I want to see those icons in my installation of StarOffice, too.

Unfortunately, StarOffice does not offer the Icon Style list box. There may be a reason for this decision, but there don't seem to be any technical barriers to use an OOo icon set for StarOffice. You can even use a different icon set for every user on a network installation. This is how to proceed - but be careful, this is not an official method but more of a "hack":

1. Get the images_crystal.zip file from an OOo installation. The images*.zip files are stored in the {OOo_installation}/share/config folder.
2. Copy the file to your {StarOffice8_userfiles}/user/config folder. On Linux systems, this is ~/.staroffice8/user/config. On Windows systems, this is something like C:\Documents and Settings\your_username\Application Data\StarOffice8\user\config.
3. Rename the copied file to images.zip
4. Restart StarOffice 8 to see the new icons. You may want to select the "large" icon size in Tools - Options - StarOffice - View.

As a StarOffice user, I want to thank all OOo icon artists for their great work that they contribute to the community!

Starting with the developer snapshot m213, the new Chart module can be tried out. The next release of OpenOffice.org 2.3 should include this new module for every user.

There are many enhancements. See the list of the most important new or changed features: http://graphics.openoffice.org/chart/whatsnewinchart2.html

The new Chart is much easier to use, with a live preview and improved workflow.

But the main reason to write about the new Chart is the improved application help for Chart.

This is the first time that an OpenOffice.org member, Regina Henschel from the very active German OOo users group, submitted a substantial part of the help text for a whole OOo module. A big Thank You goes to Regina! Due to her work the new Chart help is much better and more complete than it would have been otherwise. Our collaboration by email and Issuezilla mails has been a pleasant experience.

The technical writers at Sun Microsystems would very much appreciate to work together with many more OOo community authors to provide improved contents to all other modules of the application help. Please have a look at our Wiki page http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/OOo_OnlineHelp to find out how you can help with the Help and thus make the OpenOffice.org software even better than it is today.

You can insert a cell data range from a Calc spreadsheet into your Impress presentation. Two different approaches can be used, depending on your intention:

Inserting a static copy of the cell data

A static copy of the Calc data is a one time snapshot of the Calc data that you put into an Impress slide. There is no link between both sets of data. If you cange the cell data in Calc, the data in your slide will not be affected. You can also change the contents of the table in your slide. This affects only the local copy inside your slide, it will not change the original Calc sheet.

This is quite easy using copy and paste.

1. Select and copy (Ctrl+C) the cells in Calc

2. Go to the slide where you want to insert the data

3. Press Ctrl+V to paste the data as table that is an OLE object

Now you can rescale the table as a whole object, by dragging any of the eight handles. This will distort the table, however.

If you want to change some formatting, for example the font size or the zoom factor, double-click the OLE object. This places you into the inplace edit mode, where you can use the Calc formatting features to edit the table inside your Impress slide. You can also change the size of the view, for example to show a 3x4 cell area. Click outside the object to leave the edit mode.

Inserting a live link to the saved version of a Calc file

As a recently added new feature, you can also insert a one-way live link from a range of Calc data. You will get the opportunity to see always the latest cell contents from the Calc sheet in your Impress slide.

As with the static copy method described above, you can change the table formatting and its contents in the slide.

When you later open the Impress presentation file, you will be asked if you want to update the links or not. If you answer Yes to update the links, the changes that you edited in your slide will be overwritten by the current data from the Calc spreadsheet file. Only the saved data from the Calc spreadsheet file are used.

1. Go to the slide where you want to insert the data

2. Choose Insert - Object - OLE object

3. Select the Object type with "Spreadsheet" in the name

4. Click Create from file

5. Enable the Link to file checkbox

6. Enter the file name or click Search to select the Calc file
   

You can manually update the link in Impress. Choose Edit - Links, select the link to the Calc sheet, and click the Update button.

Only use a Calc file with a few cells. You will only see the first sheet as an OLE object, and it can get difficult to resize the view in case there are many rows or columns.

Printing All Formulas Used in Your Calc Sheets

Sometimes you want a printed reference of the formulas that you entered to a spreadsheet. You can get a printout of all formulas by a few mouse clicks.

Most Calc users already know that it is easy to see the formulas on screen:

• Choose Tools - Options - OOo Calc - View, then enable Display - Formulas.

Now, to print the formulas you have to look at a different option.

• Choose Format - Page - Sheet, then enable Print - Formulas. Print the spreadsheet.

Don't forget to reset the Print - Formulas setting after printing, so you will get the calculated values again on later printouts.

If you need a file that lists the formulas, enable printing formulas as above, then choose File - Export to PDF. The resulting PDF file lists all formulas in the defined print range.