OpenOffice Tips

Here are some customizations I often perform to OpenOffice. These are especially useful when documenting code or coding techniques.

Teletype Font

Often you want to express the names of classes in a monospace font. If you have to do it often in a document, it can be a real pain switching back and forth between Times Roman and Courier New. Here's a way to toggle back and forth.

  1. Select Tools → Customize.
  2. Select the Keyboard tab.
  3. In the bottom left Category box expand Styles and click Character Styles.
  4. In the Function box select Teletype.
  5. In the top box labeled Shortcut keys select Ctrl+T and click the Modify button. This should cause it to appear in the Keys list.
  6. Click OK.

Now you're set. As you're typing in your document, when you want to toggle to monospace font, just hit Ctrl+T. When you're finished with the monospace portion, hit either Ctrl+N (for Normal) or hit Shift+Ctrl+Space to return back to the default settings for the current style. The latter is probably better since it makes better use of styles, but it requires three fingers instead of two.

Right Arrows

When your documenting a menu navigation, it's often convenient to incorporate a right-arrow, such as File → Save. If you insist on being lame, you can still use File -> Save.

The long-way to insert the → into your text is to click the Insert menu and select Special Character. From here you can eventually find the right-arrow from about a thousand other "special" characters. But once you done this, follow these steps.

  1. Copy the → onto the clipboard.
  2. Click Tools → AutoCorrect.
  3. Select the Replace tab.
  4. In the Replace field, type (rightarrow).
  5. In the With field, paste the → that you copied from your document.
  6. Click OK.

Now when you type (rightarrow), as soon as you type the space after "(rightarrow)", it should turn into an actual →. And you can keep right on typing.