Customizing Writer

OpenOffice.org 3 Writer Guide

Chapter 17: Customizing Writer

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• Customizing menu content
• Customizing toolbars
• Assigning shortcut keys
• Assigning macros to events
• Adding functionality with extensions

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This is Chapter 17 of the OpenOffice.org 3 Writer Guide, produced by the OOoAuthors group. A PDF of this chapter is available from this wiki page. The PDFs are up to date for the second edition of the book, and the wiki pages for this chapter have been updated.

Introduction

This chapter describes some common customizations that you may wish to do.

You can customize menus, toolbars, and keyboard shortcuts in OpenOffice.org, add new menus and toolbars, and assign macros to events. However, you cannot customize context (right-click) menus.

Other customizations are made easy by extensions that you can install from the OpenOffice.org website or from other providers.

Customizations to menus and toolbars can be saved in a template. To do so, first save them in a document and then save the document as a template as described in Chapter 10 (Working with Templates).

Choosing Menu items using the keyboard

Some of the characters shown on the menu bar are underlined. You can open the menus by pressing the underlined character together with the Alt key. Once the menu is opened, you can access menu items by pressing the underlined character key.

Using shortcut keys in dialogs

When you open any dialog, one element (such as a button, an option field, an entry in a list box, or a checkbox) is highlighted or indicated by a dotted box around the field or button name. This element is said to have the focus on it.

If the focal point is a button, pressing Enter runs it as if you had clicked it with the mouse. A checkbox is toggled on or off by pressing the spacebar. If an option field has the focus, use the arrow keys to change the activated option field in that area. Press the Tab key to go from one element or area to the next one, or press Shift+Tab to go in the reverse direction.

Press Esc to close the dialog without saving changes or activating any commands.

Interrupting macros

To terminate a macro that is currently running, press Shift+Ctrl+Q.