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.

• 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).

  
  

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Now you see them, now you don't - I'm writing about those toolbars, as we call them, that keep popping up whenever you don't need them. While later, once you managed to get rid of them, you could need the one or the other toolbar, but where is it now?

OpenOffice.org by default tries to show the toolbars that you might need, according to the current context. When you use the down arrow key to scroll down a Writer text, different toolbars can appear.

• With the cursor in a table, you see the Table toolbar.

• Position the cursor inside a numbered list, and you see the Bullets and Numbering toolbar.

• A list inside a Writer table cell even shows both of the above.

• Scrolling across an image, another toolbar asks for your attention. And so on.
  

Now, if you don't want such a toolbar you can close it with the small icon on top of that toolbar. Scroll further down and back, and there it is again. This can get annoying.

But keep in mind that toolbars are there to help you with editing, formatting, inserting new objects, and so on.

These kind and helpful companions can be scared away in two different ways:

• Click the Close icon on a toolbar to close the bar temporarily. It will reappear as soon as possible.

• Choose “View - Toolbars - (name of the toolbar)” to close it forever.

A permanently closed toolbar will never again come back. Except when you summon it up by “View - Toolbars - (name of the toolbar)”.

By the way, it's easy to lose track of what all those icons do. Here are another two companions, one temporarily and one permanently: You can enable an extended help text for every icon.

• Press Shift+F1 and point the mouse to an icon. You see the extended help text. This mode is valid until you click anywhere or press Esc.

• Choose "Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org - General" and enable the extended help tips permanently.