Personalizing the Interface
As you advance through Writer, you’ll be revisiting the Paragraph dialog box quite often. You can save some time by adding a new icon to the Formatting toolbar to launch the dialog box and also giving it a keyboard shortcut.
As you advance through Writer, you’ll be revisiting the Paragraph dialog box quite often. You can save some time by adding a new icon to the Formatting toolbar to launch the dialog box and also giving it a keyboard shortcut.
Usually there are levels of keyboard shortcuts in use on most computer systems. First, there are systemwide shortcuts that work across many applications. These include things like Ctrl+S for saving, Ctrl+C for copying, and Ctrl+P for pasting. The second-level shortcuts are suite- specific; Ctrl+B makes selected text bold in all of the OO.o applications (and in many other office suites), but launches, for example, a text options box in Adobe’s InDesign. The third level is application specific, such as using Ctrl+1 to apply a particular text style to some selected text. Although you can assign any combination of keys to almost any task in OO.o, it’s best to steer clear of the most common combinations when defining or redefining shortcuts using the following method.
To do the former, choose Tools --> Customize, and select the Toolbars tab (see Figure 1-15). Under the OpenOffice.org Toolbars section, choose Formatting from the drop- down list, and scroll down the long list to find Paragraph. Click Paragraph, and a new icon will appear at the far right of the Formatting toolbar. You can change its position by clicking the up arrow next to the list; the higher it appears in the list, the farther left it will be on the toolbar.
The keyboard shortcut is again added by choosing Tools --> Customize, but this time, you choose the Keyboard tab. Although hundreds of options are available here, the process is actually quite simple, as you can see in Figure 1-16.
Start by choosing a vacant key combination to contain the command from the Shortcut keys section. Ctrl+6 is free, so you can use that. It might seem sensible to choose something like Ctrl+P for the paragraph settings, but that is a standard keyboard shortcut for printing, so it’s better to opt for something that doesn’t conflict. With the shortcut defined, you can now add the command using the three windows at the bottom of the dialog
box, which is just an alternative way of looking at the menu structure of the application. In the Category pane, select Format to repopulate the Function pane in the center. Scroll through the list until you find Paragraph, and click it. Click the Modify button on the top right of the dialog box, and the key combination will be bound to the command. Note that commands can be bound to any number of key combinations, but each shortcut can only have one command.
box, which is just an alternative way of looking at the menu structure of the application. In the Category pane, select Format to repopulate the Function pane in the center. Scroll through the list until you find Paragraph, and click it. Click the Modify button on the top right of the dialog box, and the key combination will be bound to the command. Note that commands can be bound to any number of key combinations, but each shortcut can only have one command.
You can also edit a shortcut; for example, if you wanted to bind Ctrl+P to the Paragraph options, you find the shortcut in the list, reconfigure the Functions at the bottom of the dialog box, and click Modify. More importantly, if you’re working with OO.o across a number of computers, you can save reconfigured shortcuts by using the Save button, moving the file to the second machine, and importing them with the Load button, which means there’s no need to duplicate a lot of effort across machines. You can also restore the default combinations using the Reset button.
Any changes you make are written to the system only when you click the OK button, so if you mess things up, just select Cancel to revert to the pre- edited state. Now the all- important paragraph options are just a button or shortcut away; but while you’re editing the user interface, think about the other tools that might be useful on one of the toolbars or that might need to be moved. The entire interface can be edited through the Customize option. Moreover, if you only need regular access to a particular button for a short time, you can hide previously added buttons from a toolbar (and, obviously return them) by clicking the down arrow at the far right of any toolbar, selecting Visible buttons, and then deselecting the appropriate option. This is different from removing a button using Tools --> Customize because the button is not completely removed; you can add it again by going back to the Visible buttons and reselecting the tool.
