Undocking the Gallery

READ THE WHOLE POST BEFORE YOU DO THIS.

The Gallery is a nice tool for easy access to clip art or any graphics. Here are a couple blogs on it.

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2007/09/getting-a-pictu.html

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2007/04/adding_graphics.html

Here's a tip from Dave Richards -- you can make the gallery float, so that you can position it in a more convenient place in your work area.

What the Gallery Generally Looks Like

Choose Tools > Gallery, and you get the clip art and categories on your system. (You can click on each of these images to see a bigger version.)

Adjusting the Amount of Space for the Gallery

You can make the gallery take up less, or more, room, by moving your mouse over the small dotted portion of the border, as shown. When you mouse turns into a double-ended arrow, drag up or down.

Then the Gallery portion is smaller or larger, depending on your adjustments.

Floating the Gallery

However, if you'd like your Gallery to be a floating pane like some of the other windows in OpenOffice.org, you can do that. Click and hold down on the gray part at the top, and drag down into the middle of the document.

When you see a rectangle with a gray dashed border, release. The Gallery will be a floating pane.

You can resize and move the pane as you would normally for any floating pane.

Redocking the Gallery

Now, here's the question -- how do you get the Gallery back to where it was, docked at the top?

Not easily. ;>

You can drag the Gallery easily to the left, right, or bottom, and redock it there. Just drag toward the border and when you see the gray dashed border again, release and the Gallery will be docked.  (To turn off the Gallery, just choose Tools > Gallery again.)

You can redock the Gallery at the top, it's just really tricky. There is a very small area where you can position the Gallery floating pane and the gray dashed border will appear. Here's the area where it is. Drag the Gallery through it slowly; dragging down usually works better for me than dragging up.

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Comments

[JJ]

Interesting article, though when I open the Gallery in my OpenOffice 2.3.1 I don't see many graphics that can be useful. The contents of the Gallery is VERY poor...

[Solveig]

The Gallery is provided as a location; the clip art is up to you. I assume it has to do with the OpenOffice license and keeping it free. However, there are many places to get clip art for free for your own use, and it's easy to add to the gallery.

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2007/09/getting-a-pictu.html

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2007/04/adding_graphics.html

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2007/08/clip-art-for-sc.html

http://www.clip-art.com/index.php