Friday Mar 27, 2009

Use the Mouse to Zoom and Scroll

Most users of OpenOffice.org use a mouse device with a scroll wheel.

  • You can turn this scroll wheel up and down to scroll the OpenOffice.org document window up and down.

    But there is more to the scroll wheel than vertically scrolling.

  • Hold down the Shift key while turning the scroll wheel, and you will scroll horizontally through your document, from right to left and back.

  • Hold down the Ctrl key while turning the scroll wheel to zoom the document window in and out.

The scroll wheel also acts as a third or middle mouse button. In OpenOffice.org, you can select what should happen when you press the middle mouse button:

  • Choose Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org - View. Look at the Middle mouse button drop-down list.

You can choose from the three options: No function, Automatic scrolling, Paste clipboard.

When Automatic scrolling is enabled, you click the middle mouse button in a document to see a special icon. This icon looks like a compass rose with four directions. When you now move the mouse, the document scrolls in the same direction. Click any mouse button to exit this scrolling mode.

When Paste clipboard is enabled, a middle mouse click pastes the contents of the " middle mouse clipboard". This is a function that Solaris and Linux users know well, while it may be new to Windows users, where this X Window selection clipboard does not exist. It is a clipboard that always holds the text that was selected last, no matter in which window. Once that last selection gets cleared, the clipboard is cleared, too. This special clipboard lives independently from the "normal" clipboard that you use from the Edit menu or by Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, and Ctrl+X.

All these functions require a mouse device and software that supports these functions. As these functions are not OpenOffice.org functions, you will not see a description in the OpenOffice.org Help.


Wednesday Sep 17, 2008

Sometimes, when you look into the OOo application help, the right side help page is shown with less than 100 percent zoom. This makes reading the help text a difficult task.

Fortunately, it is possible to get back the right view of the help page, although this requires several steps:

1. Close the Help viewer.

2. Choose File - New - HTML Document.

    Now you are in Writer/Web. You can check this in the View menu, which contains now a HTML Source command.

3. Choose View - Zoom. Set the zoom factor to at least 100 percent or higher.

4. Press F1 to open the Help Viewer.

The Help viewer uses the same settings that you define for Writer/Web (html) documents.


This blog copyright 2009 by fpe