OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas

How to create data entry forms from scratch, and make them into PDFs, in OpenOffice.org

Would you like to create:

• A travel request form that your users fill out, then print or save and submit?
• A public records form that residents of your city or county need to fill out, that you can just post on your government web site?
• Any other form that people use that could contain check boxes, radio buttons, dropdown list, date entry fields, regular data entry fields, etc.?

Then use this PDF to learn how. It's a step-by-step guide to creating various types of fields using the Writer form tools. The PDF is for use by anyone for personal or professional use, but not for republication or other reuse in another form; if you'd like to reference it, please link back here.

If you use Linux, you MUST try gLabels

Download it now, use it now.

http://glabels.sourceforge.net/

This is a beautiful program, a well-balanced combination of power, simplicity, good design, and ease of use. Thanks to Keith for pointing it out to me.

There's no Windows or Mac version, sadly.

Among the things you can do are:
- automatically (no effort on your party) suppress empty address lines
- do bar codes
- point straight to a CSV or similar format file to bring in records
- deselect records you don't want to print
- add graphics and drawing shapes
- apply formatting
- easily preview the whole sheet

Here's a screen shot with a summary of what you do. I'll do more detailed instructions later but here's the quick info. I love it.

 

Any way to use gmail with OpenOffice's File > Send email function?

Hi,

With Google mail and apps and documents being more widely used in a business environment, does anyone know of a way to use the File > Send > Document as Email (etc.) features in OpenOffice.org, with gmail? Or any other webmail interface like Yahoo?

Quirks in OpenOffice.org Writer 2.x notes (comments) that you can easily get around

This will all change with OpenOffice.org 3.0, which is bringing in Microsoft Office-style display of notes. However, until then, here's some good stuff to know.

You can insert a note, aka a comment, by clicking in the text and choosing Insert > Note. You get this box; you type; you click OK.

You then see the note indicator. It's a small yellow box. Move your mouse over the box and you'll see the note.

It's not big and not obvious. One thing you might consider doing is to choose Tools > Options > Openoffice.org > Appearance and choose a different color for your notes.

It doesn't make it bigger but if the color is more obvious to you, then that's good.

Here's something else to know. The note display is affected  by whether nonprinting characters are on. Choose View > Nonprinting Characters to toggle back and forth.

Not showing

Showing

Now, as you can see the same two notes are shown regardless of whether nonprinting characters are showing, at this point. The document is in .odt format, normal format. BUT if you save the document as Word format, AND someone adds comments/notes using Word, AND then you open up the document again in OpenOffice, you won't see the notes they added.

UNLESS you have nonprinting characters turned ON.

So here I am editing one comment, and adding another comment, in Word.
 

Here I am opening up the document again, the .doc format document, in Writer. Nonprinting characters are OFF so you don't see the comment that was added in Word.

 

Choose View > Nonprinting Characters, and it appears. Look at the end of the paragraph.

 

Here's another way to more easily see all your comments, without having to look for the little yellow or green or magenta marker. Press F5 to open the Navigator, scroll down, and find the Notes item. Click the + to expand it and you'll see all your comments. Double-click one to go to the place where the comment was inserted. See that even though nonprinting characters aren't showing, all three comments are shown in the Navigator.

Distorting Shapes to Make the Objects You Need: Using the OpenOffice Draw Distortion Tools

I like to fiddle around with Draw. In the 2.0 release I need to do it less because of all the great prefab shapes. However, sometimes you just need to create your own shapes. Make a shape vaguely like a Hershey's kiss, or just make something totally unusual.

You have the tools to do this with the Mode toolbar. Choose View > Toolbars > Mode.

The far right tool on the upper row and the first two on the lower row are the fun ones.

Here's how it works. Just draw a normal shape. Select it, then click on the icon you want. You'll see a message like this; click Yes.

So let's take a look at what happens to perfectly innocent shapes when you use the distortion and set-in-circle tools. Here are the perfectly innocent shapes I'll work with, but you can use any polygon shape include the smiley face shown at the top.

I'll show the effects of this tool first.

I select the blue shape then click the Set in Circle tool. When I move my mouse over the shape and drag a corner, I get something like this.

 

Here's the effect of some random distortion of the three original shapes.

Next, let's look at the Set to Circle (slightly different)  icon.

Here's what it looks like when you start fiddling with a shape. It doesn't show here but your mouse pointer will look like a little crown when you move it over a corner.

Here are the three original shapes, just showing what I happened to do with them. Your results will vary.

And here's the last of the three icons, Distort.

Here's how I chose to distort the objects.

The Set in Circle item is the most fun, I think, and that's what I used to create the purple shape at the top. However, they're all quite useful depending on what kind of shape you need to create.

And don't overlook distorting a shape, then making it 3D. Select the distorted shape, right click, and choose Convert > To 3D. (NOT 3D rotation object.)

---

---

Search this blog:

» Blogs that link here

 

NPR's reading of the Declaration of Independence

If you haven't read it, or haven't listened to it, I recommend it. It's the annual highlight of my day. In part due to the well reasoned and well written document; in part due to the excellent reading and music; and in part due to the irony.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92108861

http://www.npr.org/documents/2006/jul/declaration.pdf

http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm

OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet settings for how a cell is filled

When it comes to cells, I like my content to look either like the first cell, or the second cell. If there's enough room for all the content; great. If there isn't, I like a nice wrap.

To wrap content in a cell, select the cell or cells then choose Format > Cells, Alignment tab, and select Wrap Text Automatically.

If you've got just barely not enough room, you can also move your mouse over the right-hand border of the cell's COLUMN separator, and when it looks like this, double-click. Bam, the whole column will be just barely as wide as the widest cell in the column.

Here are a couple other options that I just started looking at. Shrink to Fit Cell Size, and for the horizontal justification, Filled. You get to them the same way you get to the wrap option: select the cell or cells then choose Format > Cells, Alignment tab, and select the options you want.

Here's how each option looks. The demo content is in plain text and the explanation is in caps to the right of the relevant cell. Frankly I'm not sure how much I would use the Filled justification; seems a little dangerous.

---

---

Video tutorial for creating cross-references

It takes a while to load, but should run fine once it gets going. (Optimization is one of the things I'm working on as I create more of these.)

It's about how to create cross-references in Writer, and what they are.

Note: The video uses the Navigator (press F5) to get around more easily to various headings being referenced. The Navigator shows you the structure of your document and the objects in it. By "structure" I mean that it shows all the text to which you have applied the paragraph styles Heading1, Heading2, and so on. More specifically, it shows whatever you have set up as the paragraph styles defining your documentBy structure under Tools > Outline Numbering. That's a whole nother topic, though a very useful one. To learn more about outline numbering and the Navigator, see these blog entries.

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/10/in_praise_of_ou.html

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2007/06/using_the_navig.html
http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2007/06/going_to_a_spec.html
http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2007/06/leaving_a_trail.html

---

---

TechTarget Article: Just Say No to Unnecessary Tabs and Carriage Returns (and Say Yes to Better Interoperability

I've written an article for TechTarget that's not really about using OpenOffice.org per se. It's more about good document construction and formatting. 

The thing is, though, when you do the formatting correctly, lots of nice things happen. The document looks more professional, it's far easier to update, and goes between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org more easily with fewer formatting snafus. And it's not just between those two office suites--better-formatted documents transfer better between different versions of the same office suite, different platforms, and different computers.

It's all about letting the software do a bit of the work, based on what makes sense for it and its environment, rather than laying down the law yourself with manual things like tabs and carriage returns. Instead, you want to just use the formatting capabilities in the program, typically under Format > Paragraph. Doing this, as well as giving your document some wiggle-room and not cramming content into each page, will make a bi-office-suite life go more smoothly.

Separation of format and content. It's not just for XML anymore.

Note: This isn't wildly revolutionary stuff, at least not in the world of publishing and techwriting that I started in 15 years ago. (We had a templates guardian who would threaten to break our knees if we even created an unauthorized style, much less did manual formatting like the stuff described in the article.) But in the--oh, let's say "real world"--where you just sit down at your desk and try to churn out reports for that crazy boss of yours, or when you come from a programming background where vi was your text editor, this could be new and useful info.

The article is based on my experience, as well as what makes sense logically. I've seen a lot of documents that have the manual formatting mentioned in the article, when I go out to train and consult. The first thing I do when I'm looking at a problem document for a client is to choose View > Nonprinting Characters and something manual almost always turns up. There'll be extra tabs, unexpected soft returns, spaces instead of indenting, etc.

I also encounter fewer conversion issues with documents I create, than people in the world at large seem to. I was puzzled by this before I started training, but then realized that it was probably my techwriter/desktop publishing background making the difference.

So--this is just an explanation and an implied caveat. I don't double-dog guarantee that your conversion problems between MS and OpenOffice.org will dribble away to nothing if you format your documents as I recommend. But my experience is that it should help, much of the time.

---

---

Creating your own order to sort with: leaving alphanumeric in the dust

I've been blogging about sorting for a while:

• Easy sorting
• Standard, more powerful sorting
• Sorting by a custom sort order

There's just one more thing to mention: creating your own custom sort order.

Existing sort orders are things like Monday Tuesday Wednesday (the right order, which is not alphabetical). But let's say you've got things you want in a certain logical but non-alphabetical order that aren't already set up in OpenOffice.org: titles of books or people, procedures done in a certain order, or your own abbreviations for the days of the week. You can create sort orders for those very easily so you can sort by them.

Let's say you've got this data.

This is the right order. If you had them out of order, though, and wanted to sort them, all you'd have the option for is alphabetic. Which isn't right. So you create an order to sort them by.

Select just the content of the sort order, nothing else. Be sure it's in the order you want it.

Choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org  Calc > Sort Lists.

Now just click Copy.

The list will appear. Click OK.

Now just sort the way you would with a custom sort order. You'll see your new sort order in the sort window.

Sort orders are nice for quick data entry, too. If you type the first word for a sort order, then find the small black handle in the lower right corner of the cell and drag, you'll be able to easily fill the cells with the rest of the content in the sort order.

Type the first word

Find the black handle and drag (magnified to show the handle)

The data will fill in each cell you drag through, in the order set up in the sort list.