It's not wildly obvious, but you can make that window bigger.
Here's it's natural state. Not that big if you want to scroll through all the records or fields.
Just drag it to the right to make it wider, and up to make it higher. I'm not positive how it works on all OSes but it seems like it should.
I hate it when I blithely skip by fantastic built-in features.
No more skipping by.
So you've got 2000 employees, or members, or whatever. You need to send out a letter reminding people to, oh, sign up for benefits, or renew their membership, or maybe it's just a congratulatory letter for some people who have five years of service now and are going to get that sterling silver ice bucket they've always wanted. Or let's say you need to print labels for everyone but you need to do it in order by zip code or the people at the post office are going to be very annoyed.
You don't need to set up a query ahead of time in Base or in Calc. You don't need to go into Base or Calc and sort the information. You could, it would be fine, but it's more work than you need to do.
Just specify what you want, when you print.
You know how to print a mail merge letter, envelope document, or label document. You choose File > Print, click Yes in that little window that asks you about a form letter, and you get the print window.
Check out the top row of icons.
Sorting
Here's what you get when you click the Sort icon. Just choose to sort by a field, up or down, then others if you need to. Just like the sort in Calc.
Or if you just want a quick sort-by-one-field thing, click on column of your choice, then click the A>Z or Z>A icon to sort ascending or descending.
Filtering
To use the quick autofilter, click on a particular cell in a row. One single value, like the city where one person is from. Click the AutoFilter icon; you'll get all the records that match that value.
Results:
If you want a little more control over the filter, click the Standard Filter icon. It's just like the standard one in Calc. NOTE: The AND/OR fields in the 2nd and 3rd rows aren't enabled until you select something to filter by in those rows. It looks like they're not available, but they are.
And results.
To turn off the standard filter, click the Apply Filter icon; to get the filter back on, click it again.
You can also remove any filter or sort with this icon.
When you're done, just print as usual; I recommend selecting File, and Save as Single Document. Click OK and name the output file.
This creates a perfectly ordinary Writer document with all the fields merged, one copy of your original mail merge document for each record you chose to print by.
Then you open that Writer document, check it over a bit to be sure it's what you want, then print that as you would any other Writer document. (The illustration cuts out the bottom half of each page for space reasons; you would have an entire page for each person.)
I ran into Christian Einfeldt at Linuxworld, who mentioned that he had some questions about printing envelopes. It's a good perennial topic, so I'm rereposting.
(Originally posted December 2, 2005)
I get a lot of questions about envelopes. A lot. I wrote an article for TechTarget.com about how to do envelopes in OpenOffice.org 2.0.
I included some templates there; here are the same envelope templates for OpenOffice.org 2.0.
The article is long and detailed. Here are the key points.
You need to get to know your printer and let it know to expect envelope shapes, not letter or A4 shapes.
You also need to fiddle around for a while and figure out where--left, right, perpendicular, parallel--in the tray your printer expects envelopes. Buy a box of cheap envelopes and expect to waste a few while you experiment.
Then make sure that your envelope document is set up to print to the envelope size your printer is expecting. Envelope 10 is good.
Then just print the envelope. (If you're using data sources, click Yes in the dialog box that appears asking if you want to print a form letter.)
The next time you want envelopes, just use that same document you already created, and change the addresses. Either save the document in myimportantdocuments\envelopes, or if you're a template kind of person, make it a template. (File > Templates > Save, select a category and name the template, then choose File > New > Templates and Documents and pick your envelope template.
Note: Doing it in 2.0 is quite similar to how to do it in OpenOffice.org 1.1. Here are my posts how to do that; they're excerpted from my OpenOffice.org workbooks.
Tip on Printer Setup
Some of the pain of envelopes is the printer setup. Here's a GREAT tip from Miriam:
"I just read your envelope printing tip. Instead of constantly changing
and checking the printer settings, I add another instance of the
printer, configure it for envelopes and name it "envelope." When I want
to print an envelope I choose this printer instead of the default one.
That way my settings are always the same."
Envelope Mantra
Here's the other main point I want to make sure everyone understands.
Envelopes aren't too bad once you figure out how to do it the first time. Honest.
Here's how to just print out a few labels very simply.
I follow this procedure when I ship out books. Let's say I've got five people who've ordered books directly from me through PayPal or Amazon. I've got five emails in my inbox, with five addresses. So I need to make five labels.
I describe the simple but more labor-intensive way in the following steps. Then at the end I show what I actually do that adds a little bit of one-time extra setup and makes the whole process much simpler.
1. Choose File > New > Labels.* (See note at end.)
In this window, look at the two lists in the lower right corner. Pick the right layout, usually Avery Letter, and the kind of labels you're using (the number is on the box or envelope) like 8160.
2. Click the Options tab and make sure that the Synchronize checkbox is NOT marked.
3. Click New Document.
4. You'll see the new empty label document.
5. Now just type the content you want in each box. OR copy and paste. In my example, I copy the address from my email and paste it into the box.
If you've already used up some of the labels on the physical sheet you're going to print onto, then just start pasting or typing in the next available box.
If you have trouble clicking in a box to type, click somewhere in the blank margin around the area where the boxes are, then click in the middle of the box. You'll then see a normal blinking cursor and you'll be able to type.
6. To format the text differently, you could do a few different things. Pick any of the following; I recommend b or c.
a - Just format every text box the same, manually.
b - Format the first text box how you want it, and select some of the formatted text. Then DOUBLE-CLICK the Paintbrush icon.
Select every additional text box with text to format the same way.
Then CLICK the Paintbrush icon again and you're done.
c - Format the first text box how you want it. With some formatted text selected, choose Format > Styles and Formatting. Click and hold down on the far right icon and choose Update Style. All the other boxes will be formatted the same way.
7. Now just stick the label sheet in your printer and print. If you want more than one sheet of labels, then just print out these, then type the new addresses over the old addresses and print a second sheet. (Or save this sheet, then choose File > Save As and save the sheet under a different name, and type the second set of addresses over the old addresses.)
* NOTE: What I actually do instead of steps 1-4 and 6 is open the label template that I created. I went through this entire process, then formatted the text the way I wanted it. I formatted the text in the first label box the way I wanted it. Then I choose Format > Styles and Formatting, I clicked and held down the mouse on the far right icon, and chose Update Style, as in step 6-c above. After that, I chose File > Templates > Save. I named the template Labels and clicked OK.
That's what I did to create the template the way I wanted it. Then instead of step 1, I choose File > New > Templates and Documents, and pick Labels from my list of templates.
I've been so caught up in the complicated tools and cool hacks that I've forgotten about the really simple ways to get data from a database into a Writer document.
I'm so embarrassed.
Here's a simple way to bring in data, whether it's still in fields, or just plain text. You probably want to use this instead of the Reports feature, and instead of the Next Record field under Insert > Fields > Other, Database tab.
Here are some screen shots. I'll do more on this later but I just wanted to slap these options out there so you know about them.
Click any of the screen shots to see them bigger and in more detail.
1. Create a new text document and choose F4.
2. Click the + by your database, click the + by the word Table (or Query) and click the table or query you want to print.
3. Click the blank gray square shown, to the left of the first fieldname.
4. Click and hold down on that gray square and drag into the document.
5. Now you have various options. 
Pick the option you want, insert the fields you want, apply any relevant formatting, and click OK.
Table
Fields
Text
Then print. If you bring in the data in fields, when you choose Print, click Yes when prompted and DON'T click the checkbox.)
Again, if you're printing in fields, you cna print to files or a printer. To select specific records, select the first record, hold down Ctrl, select another record, and so on.
See also this post and this post on printing spreadsheets.
In Word, I believe, and possibly other applications, you can drag the default page breaks to where you want them, in print preview.
In OpenOffice.org Calc, there is no feature to do this in the page preview window.
But there sure as heck is one in the Page Break Preview window. You can insert page breaks, and drag default or inserted page breaks to where you want them.
Turning on Page Break Preview
Choose View > Page Break Preview. To turn it off, choose View > Normal.
Here's what it looks like.
Inserting a Manual Page Break
You can do this anytime, regardless of whether Page Break Preview is on. However, this illustration shows it on. Click on a row or column, and choose Insert > Manual Break. The appropriate selection will be available.
Dragging Page Breaks
Move your mouse over the page break and watch for the mouse pointer to turn into a two-ended arrow.
Then drag it right or left, up or down. The page break will change position accordingly.
If you drag an end or side page break into the document, then the column(s) or row(s) will appear as shown and they won't print. This is one way to control what prints, along with page ranges (select cells and choose Format > Print Ranges > Define for the first one in a document; Format > Print Ranges > Add for subsequent ones).
this post and this post on printing spreadsheets.
You're going along, minding your own business, doing your spreadsheet. You print. Ten minutes later the irate printer guy comes along, saying "Would you mind not printing 200 pages at once????"
You're irritated since you just....well, you just MEANT to print the current sheet which has three pages.
But when you click Print or choose File > Print and don't modify this in any way, you print the WHOLE spreadsheet. Possibly including blank pages.
There are several ways to change this.
To print only the current sheet by default and prevent any blank pages from printing:
Choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org Calc > Print.
Select both options shown. Click OK. Now only the current sheet will print, and no blank pages will be printed.
To do this on the fly for each time you print.
Choose File > Print, click Options, then set the options in the options window that appears. This will make the change only for the current print job.
To select more than one sheet to print:
Click on the first sheet you want to print. Then hold down Ctrl and select any other sheet(s).
Or for contiguous sheets, click on the first sheet you want to print. Then hold down Shift and select the last sheet you want to print.
Used to be, it was hard to just print the records you wanted to print in a mail merge, in OpenOffice.org mail merges.
Bob Jones 121 Ludlow
Marie Hanson 1688 Oak
Kathy Bates 88 Pearl
What if you're mad at Marie, though, as well as Jean, John, and Xavier, and just want to print a holiday letter to Bob and to Kathy and the other 119 people in your list who you're still speaking to?
You had to either go through the HUGE and complex mail merge wizard, or just print a letter each for Marie, Jean, John, and Xavier, and throw them away.
However, in 2.something of OpenOffice.org, you can just Ctrl - Select the records to print.
1. Make your mail merge document: labels, letter, envelopes, whatever.
2. Choose File > Print and say Yes, you want to print a form letter. NEVER mark the checkbox.
3. In the window that appears, you can scroll down to view the database and table you're using at the left side. This isn't necessary but it might help you feel more organized.
4. Click on the light gray box next to the first record you want to print. Hold down Ctrl and click on the light gray box next to the next record you want to print. And so on.
You'll see that at the left side, Selected Records is now marked.
5. Now just select Printer or File to print as you normally would, and click OK. The normal printing window will appear if you select Printer.
Another "classic" post! These are perennial questions and through reposting I'll be able to get these to come up as searchable in blog searches.
Note: Here's a related article I wrote for TechTarget.com.
I get a lot of questions when I train, and just in emails. A lot of them are about things that aren't actually hard to do but they're hard to figure out how to do in the first place. Here's how to do some of them.
Adding a Page Number to an OpenOffice.org Writer document
Note: See a related post on starting a document with no page number on the first page and page 1 on the second page.
You can do this a number of ways, but this is the quickest.
If you want to have no page number on the first page and start with 1 or 2 on the second page, that's a bit more advanced. Stay tuned for the blog on page styles.
(You can do the footer turn-on by choose Format > Page > Footers, too.)
Putting a Portrait Page and a Landscape Page in the Same Document
You absolutely can do this. It just takes a little while. You set up a page style that's horizontal, and one that's vertical, and then you just switch.
Here's a 2.0 document (twopagestyles.odt) that has a vertical page style and a horizontal page style. (You can set them up yourself using styles—Format > Styles and Formatting, then use the help.)
Stay tuned for the blog on page styles, to create page styles yourself from scratch, and to do some gnarly pagination control.
Getting exactly what you want when you choose File > New ____ Document.
The default empty blank text document and spreadsheet are fine but you'd like the margins to be wider, or the font to be different, or for it to have certain styles. It's easy to switch out what comes up under File > New > ____ Document.
Now that document will come up when you choose File > New > _____ Document (text or spreadsheet).
To go back to the original, just repeat those steps but instead of choosing Set as Default Template, choose Reset Default Template > Text Document or Reset Default Template > Spreadsheet.
Making a Watermark
If you want a graphic or piece of text behind the content of your page, you can approach it a few different ways.
If you want a text-based watermark for your document, like CONFIDENTIAL, behind just a few pages, follow these steps. You'll need to place the text box on every page where you want it to appear.
Click the “T” text icon, or if you don't see one, choose View > Toolbars > Drawing to make it appear.
Draw a box with the tool and type what you want inside, like CONFIDENTIAL.
Select the text and make it really big, maybe 66 points. You can use the font size dropdown list on the object bar for this.
Make the text gray if you want it lighter. Use the Font Color icon on the object bar.
Click somewhere else in your document, like a blank spot or some regular text.
If you want the text vertical or diagonal, click on the text box, right-click and choose Position and Size, click the Rotation tab, and in the Rotation field type the number of degrees. (You can also click on a point in the Default Settings region.) 55 degrees is good for a diagonal watermark.
Click on the text box you just drew, right-click, and choose Wrap > In Background.
Drag the text box to reposition it if it's not where you want, make the text larger or smaller, rotate it more or less, and make any other adjustments.
Here's an OpenOffice.org 2.0 document (watermarktemplate.odt ) you can use with a watermark.
If you want a graphic-based watermark for just a few pages of your document, paste it into your document on each page where you want the graphic, or choose Insert > Picture > From File. Then do step 7 from the previous step to wrap the graphic in the background.
To make the graphic lighter, select it. The Picture toolbar should appear but if it doesn't, choose View > Toolbars > Picture. Use the Brightness icon to make the graphic lighter and use the Contrast icon to decrease contrast.
To put a graphic in the background of every page of your document (every page with the Default page style, that is, or every page with the page style you modify if you know styles), follow these steps.
Dragging a Cell in a Spreadsheet
I get a kick out of how obscure this is. You can select two or more cells and drag them, but you can't drag just one.
Unless you do this.
Now you can drag the cell wherever you want.
If you've done mail merges before, you've seen this message.
What you should do, every time, is to click Yes and leave everything else alone. Then the mail merge will print with the contents of your data source.
What would make sense is to mark the Do Not Show Warning Again checkbox and click Yes, thinking that every time thereafter you'll be able to print the mailmerge correctly, with the contents of your data source, just like you did this time, but without that pesky message popping up.
You'd be logical, but you'd also be wrong because of the wacky design of the program. If you mark the checkmark, then from that day forward you will print, instead of a mail merge, a list of fields like <Firstname> and <Lastname>.
So:
How do you get that dialog box to come back so you can print a mail merge correctly?
Answer: Here's how it's supposed to work. People say this works. I can't find a file with the relevant flag in it on my machine but if it works for you, great. It should work.
<< Reader David Beroff offers some fine suggestions after his successful implementation, which I have updated the instructions with.>>
1. Close OpenOffice.org.
2. Find the Writer.xcu file. It's in one of these locations.
~/.ooo-2.0-pre/user/registry/data/org/openoffice/Office/Writer.xcu
Documents and Settings\[users]\Application Data\OpenOffice.org2\ user\registry\data\org\openoffice\Office\Writer.xcu
3. Make a backup copy of it. Just copy the file in your file manager and paste it somewhere else.
4. Open it with an Ascii editor (i.e Notepad or 1stPage or some such program.)
5. Look for <prop oor:name="AskForMerge"> and set the value to true. To do this, look for "AskForMerge=False" and type "True" where it says "False."
6. Save the file.
Now you'll get the message popping up again when you print a mail merge. Leave the checkbox alone and click Yes, and you're golden.
(Originally posted in October 2005.)
Note: Here's a related article I wrote for TechTarget.com.
What's better, software that does what it thinks you want, or software that does what you tell it to?
If it's rocket-launching software, and I don't know much about rocket-launching, I guess I would let the software do what it wants. However, I know what I darn well want my office suite software to do. I know how I want it to behave. I know what features I want and I know, for instance, that I do not want it suggesting to me what word I am typing and offering to help me finish the arduous task of typing it.
OpenOffice.org has its default behavior and default settings just like any other software but is very cooperative in letting you customize those behavior and settings the way you want them. Which is refreshing. You just have to tell it how to behave.
So I've put together a list of the top customizations I think are the most helpful and/or powerful. I make sure that everyone in my classes learns these by lunchtime, and review them afterwards. When the software behaves the way you want, that makes everything better.
(By the way, this is a little bit off topic, but I wanted to mention that the scroll graphic at the top of this blog is a drawing shape in OOo 2.0. I'm a bit of a giggly schoolgirl when it comes to the OOo drawing tools, especially the new 2.0 features.)
1. Turn off the word completion.
I hate word completion, and it’s really easy to turn off. Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click on the Word Completion tab. Make sure the Enable Word Completion option is unmarked, and click OK.
2. Turn off any automatic formatting that you don’t want.
Would you let people live in your house who you didn’t know? Then you don’t want automatic formatting going on that you don’t understand. Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click on the Options tab. Unmark everything except the top option, Use Replacement Table. Then go back through and see if you really want anything.
(You can unmark the Use Replacement Table option too....but that table is handy, as you'll see in the next item.)
3. Use the automatic formatting to create handy shortcuts.
The same tab where you turned off word completion has a really great feature for creating shortcuts. Let’s say you type the word supercalfragilisticexpealidocious a zillion times a day, or your name and title, or anything kinda long. You can set up a shortcut for it. It's a much more reliable approach than word completion.
To do this: Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click on the Replace tab.
A. In the left-hand field type your shortcut like sig and in the right-hand field, type the word you’re tired of typing all the time.
B. Click New, then click OK.
C. Click the Options tab and be sure that both checkboxes for the top item, Use Replacement Table, are marked. That just means "use the stuff in the Replace tab."
D. In your document, type the shortcut, followed by a space, and your word will appear.
Note: You can also delete anything in the Replace tab that you don't want.
4. Display the icons that you want.
There are a zillion icons in OOo as with any software and you probably don’t use all of them. There’s also that dandy little result of having to click on the black arrow to get to the icons you want, while the ones you do want sit there taking up space and, quite frankly, smiling a bit smugly. So take off the ones you don’t want, leave room for the ones you do want, and add some other ones.
First step is to take off the ones you don’t want. Click on the dropdown arrow and choose Visible Buttons. Find the icons you don’t want, like double spacing, and select them. That’ll remove the checkbox by them, and that removes them from the toolbar.
Now add the icons you want. The first thing to try is to click the dropdown arrow again and choose Visible Buttons. If the icon you want is there, select it and it’ll appear.
If the icon you want isn’t there, click on the dropdown arrow again and instead of Visible Buttons, select Customize Toolbar. Find the toolbar you want to add icons to. Click Add, and in the window that appears just keep looking through the categories on the left til you find the feature you want in the list on the right. Select it and click Add.
Back in the customization window, you can leave the icon as is and just click OK, or change the icon by clicking and holding down on the Modify button and choosing Icon.
5. Get to know the choices under Tools > Options.
Choose Tools > Options, and you’ll see the big fat configuration window. Just as the items under Tools > Autocorrect were about default behavior, Tools > Options is about default settings, default values. Anything about the program, from icon size to language settings to where the program looks when you choose File > Open, is set here.
I suggest that you open the OpenOffice.org (or StarOffice as in this illutration) item at the top, then select Paths, and change the values for any paths you use a lot. Change the My Documents item, for instance, to change the default for where OOo tries to save documents. You’ll save a lot of time scrolling around in your Save windows.
To change the path, select it in the window, click Edit, and just point to the new location.
You might also want to expand the StarOffice Write item, select Default Fonts, and choose the ones you prefer.
When you’re done, just click OK.
You can turn off the Save for Autorecovery feature if you want--or increase the save interval
I find this feature entirely un-annoying, but you can turn it off easily if you want. Autorecovery means if OpenOffice.org crashes or you have to coldboot your machine, at least you'll have something recent to return to. If you're hypervigilant, increase the interval to every minute or 5; if you don't care about it, set it to every hour or just turn it off.
Choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Load/Save > General. You're looking for the Save AutoRecovery Information Every option. Unmark it, or change the interval.
Click the thumbnail below to see a bigger image of the window.
Now OOo is more like a well-behaved pet and less likely to jump up at you, licking and biting inappropriately.
Those are not all the configuration steps you can do, by a long shot. But I like them, and students seem to like them. And they're an important set of steps in the general process of showing that OpenOffice.org does what you tell it to do.
(First posted November 2005)
Calc spreadsheet printing can be tricky. Which is too bad, because there are some fairly powerful features. Here are some questions people used to ask me a lot at when I worked at Sun. Between horrified peeks at my under-water stock options, this is what I told them.
My spreadsheet won't print the way I want. What should I do?
There is a powerful and quite easily accessible tab that lets you do a bunch of stuff with printing. Choose Format > Page and click the Sheet tab. There, you will find many useful settings such as what direction to print in (all the way down then start again, or all the way across then start again), and which items to print (grid, formulas and much more). Possibly the most useful, however, are the scaling options at the bottom which let you make the whole thing fit onto a specified number of pages or let you scale the whole thing up or down a bit.
The Page tab of that window can be useful too with more everyday settings—margins, page size, and centering the cells left-right and top-bottom within the page. Use the Table Alignment option for that last feature.
I really don't want to show McNealy the figures in column G. How do I hide that?
It's not tricky—not this approach to hiding, at any right. Select the whole column by clicking on the letter, then right-click and choose Hide. To show again, select the two columns on both sides, right-click, and choose Show.
No, I mean I want to show them in the spreadsheet while I'm working with them, I just don't want that column to print.
Oh, why didn't you say so? This is simple too. Select whatever cells shouldn't print, and choose Format > Cells. Select the Cell Protection tab. Mark the Hide When Printing option and click OK. (Remember to turn it back on again when you want them to be printed.) However, note that this won't make the cell spaces themselves go away. So hide the heading that goes with the data, and be prepared to answer questions about why that space is empty.
How do I print just specific rows or columns of my spreadsheet?
It's quick and easy, just not obvious.
If you made a mistake defining the range, repeat the step with the right range and the new range will replace the old range. Or just select the old range and choose Format > Print Ranges > Remove and start over.
If you need multiple print ranges, it might be best to consider using one of the hiding features.
I need the headings across the top, Budget and Forecast and all that, to print on every page. How do I do that?
In the previous task, the window had fields where you could pick rows to repeat. You just use those fields.
Here's a picture of the key point. Click to get a bigger graphic.
Choose File > Page Preview to check if you want to verify before printing.
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I was fiddling with a very large and ungainly spreadsheet this morning. Just bad setup, period. I was trying to figure out how in the world to keep track of what was supposed to show up in print preview, and what was actually showing up. Here's what helped.
Use the Print Column and Row Headers feature.
Choose Format > Page, click the Sheet tab, and under Print, select Print Column and Row Headers. Here's what the window looks like; click this and any other image if you want to see a bigger version.
Here's what the spreadsheet looks like in Page Preview (File > Page Preview) with that option marked.
Print the Grid for Readability
Another handy option for readability is to print the grid. The option is in the same window; choose Format > Page, click the Sheet tab, and in the Print area, mark the Grid option.
Repeat Column and Row Headings
I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. You can repeat columns and/or rows on each page by using the print range feature. It's very handy to have that data repeat. Here's what a spreadsheet looks like without the feature, and with it.
Without repeated columns and rows: page 6 of spreadsheet
With repeated columns and rows: page 6 of spreadsheet
Choose Format > Print Ranges > Edit. Click in the dropdown by the Rows to Repeat and select User-Defined, then click in the field next to it. Then, in the spreadsheet itself, click on the cells of the rows you want to repeat. Click in A1 to repeat just the first row, for instance; select A1 and A2 to repeat two rows on every page.
Do the same for columns. Click in A1 to repeat one column; select A1 and B1 to repeat two columns, and so on.
Here's what the window would look like if you wanted to repeat two rows and one column on every page. You can also type, as you see: $1 for row one; type $1:$2 for rows 1 and 2. Type $A for column A; type $A:$B for columns A and B, type $A:$D to repeat columns A through D; and so on.
Use the Page Break Preview
This really helped me this morning with the unwieldy spreadsheet. Choose View > Page Break Preview.
This is what a big view of the spreadsheet looks like in this view. Click it to see the screen shot full size.
Here's a more focused view.
If you have blank areas of the spreadsheet displayed, the page numbers might not match what's in page preview or what prints. However, the page breaks will be correct.
When you want to go back to normal view, choose View > Normal.
If you want to insert the page breaks manually, click to insert the break, and choose Insert > Manual Break > Row Break, or Insert > Manual Break > Column Break.
Print Across and Down, or Down Then Across
Remember that with big spreadsheets, you can choose to print two ways:
Print the first chunk of columns in their entirety, across all the rows and then come back to print the next chunk of columns
You can set this by choosing Format > Page, clicking the Sheet tab, and making the appropriate selection at the top of the window.
And Finally: Use the Shortcut Between Page Preview and Page Setup
You will probably be in Page Preview mode a lot (choose File > Page Preview). You'll also spend time in the Page styles window setting various options in the sheet tab. You might think you need to close the page preview mode, then go to the page setup window by choosing Format > Page. You can, but it's much quicker to just click the Page button while you're in Page Preview. That'll take you to the page setup window. Change your options there, then click OK and you'll pop back to the page preview window, with the changes you just made reflected in the view.
So: Choose File > Page Preview.
And click the Page button below to go to the page setup window.
March 2006: I've been having a bit of trouble getting some of my posts listed, so I'm reposting a couple of the ones I think are most important. This one is from back in November '05.
For all spreadsheet posts, see this index page.
Calc spreadsheet printing can be tricky. Which is too bad, because there are some fairly powerful features. Here are some questions people used to ask me a lot at when I worked at Sun. Between horrified peeks at my under-water stock options, this is what I told them.
My spreadsheet won't print the way I want. What should I do?
There is a powerful and quite easily accessible tab that lets you do a bunch of stuff with printing. Choose Format > Page and click the Sheet tab. There, you will find many useful settings such as what direction to print in (all the way down then start again, or all the way across then start again), and which items to print (grid, formulas and much more). Possibly the most useful, however, are the scaling options at the bottom which let you make the whole thing fit onto a specified number of pages or let you scale the whole thing up or down a bit.
The Page tab of that window can be useful too with more everyday settings—margins, page size, and centering the cells left-right and top-bottom within the page. Use the Table Alignment option for that last feature.
I really don't want to show McNealy the figures in column G. How do I hide that?
It's not tricky—not this approach to hiding, at any right. Select the whole column by clicking on the letter, then right-click and choose Hide. To show again, select the two columns on both sides, right-click, and choose Show.
No, I mean I want to show them in the spreadsheet while I'm working with them, I just don't want that column to print.
Oh, why didn't you say so? This is simple too. Select whatever cells shouldn't print, and choose Format > Cells. Select the Cell Protection tab. Mark the Hide When Printing option and click OK. (Remember to turn it back on again when you want them to be printed.) However, note that this won't make the cell spaces themselves go away. So hide the heading that goes with the data, and be prepared to answer questions about why that space is empty.
How do I print just specific rows or columns of my spreadsheet?
It's quick and easy, just not obvious.
If you made a mistake defining the range, repeat the step with the right range and the new range will replace the old range. Or just select the old range and choose Format > Print Ranges > Remove and start over.
If you need multiple print ranges, it might be best to consider using one of the hiding features.
I need the headings across the top, Budget and Forecast and all that, to print on every page. How do I do that?
In the previous task, the window had fields where you could pick rows to repeat. You just use those fields.
Here's a picture of the key point. Click to get a bigger graphic.
Choose File > Page Preview to check if you want to verify before printing.
Tags
(First posted November 2005)
Calc spreadsheet printing can be tricky. Which is too bad, because there are some fairly powerful features. Here are some questions people used to ask me a lot at when I worked at Sun. Between horrified peeks at my under-water stock options, this is what I told them.
My spreadsheet won't print the way I want. What should I do?
There is a powerful and quite easily accessible tab that lets you do a bunch of stuff with printing. Choose Format > Page and click the Sheet tab. There, you will find many useful settings such as what direction to print in (all the way down then start again, or all the way across then start again), and which items to print (grid, formulas and much more). Possibly the most useful, however, are the scaling options at the bottom which let you make the whole thing fit onto a specified number of pages or let you scale the whole thing up or down a bit.
The Page tab of that window can be useful too with more everyday settings—margins, page size, and centering the cells left-right and top-bottom within the page. Use the Table Alignment option for that last feature.
I really don't want to show McNealy the figures in column G. How do I hide that?
It's not tricky—not this approach to hiding, at any right. Select the whole column by clicking on the letter, then right-click and choose Hide. To show again, select the two columns on both sides, right-click, and choose Show.
No, I mean I want to show them in the spreadsheet while I'm working with them, I just don't want that column to print.
Oh, why didn't you say so? This is simple too. Select whatever cells shouldn't print, and choose Format > Cells. Select the Cell Protection tab. Mark the Hide When Printing option and click OK. (Remember to turn it back on again when you want them to be printed.) However, note that this won't make the cell spaces themselves go away. So hide the heading that goes with the data, and be prepared to answer questions about why that space is empty.
How do I print just specific rows or columns of my spreadsheet?
It's quick and easy, just not obvious.
If you made a mistake defining the range, repeat the step with the right range and the new range will replace the old range. Or just select the old range and choose Format > Print Ranges > Remove and start over.
If you need multiple print ranges, it might be best to consider using one of the hiding features.
I need the headings across the top, Budget and Forecast and all that, to print on every page. How do I do that?
In the previous task, the window had fields where you could pick rows to repeat. You just use those fields.
Here's a picture of the key point. Click to get a bigger graphic.
Choose File > Page Preview to check if you want to verify before printing.
Tags
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