Submitted by Ryan Cartwright at Freesoftware Magazine has a hot little tutorial for anyone who wants to master some very fantastically useful (but lesser known) keyboard shortcuts in OpenOffice.org (for Writer). Read the full story at FreeSoftwareMagazine.com.
Ten Fantastic Keyboard Shortcuts in OpenOffice.org
About The Author
Adam Scheinberg
Technology Executive o Web Developer o Father o Foodie o Music Snob o OS enthusiast
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First of all, I have to admit that i’m a keyboard guy. Keyboard shortcuts are fine – for those who are familiar with the keyboard and its key combinations.
Most shortcuts mentioned in the article are really ordinary functions that you find across word prrocessors since… 1990, or even earlier, when text processors were in text mode. They are not fantastic in their relationship to OpenOffice – they are standard stuff. This includes:
– Inserting a page break
– Moving around the document
– Selecting without the mouse
Regarding the page break, let me add that there are three main kinds of breaks, associated with the return key:
1. forced line break: Shift + Return
2. paragraph break (or new enum or list entry): Enter
3. page break: Ctrl + Return
Regarding movement and selection, you can apply any from the movement keys together with the Shift key in order to select, for example Ctrl + Left / Right moves word-wise, and Ctrl + Shift + Left / Right selects word-wise.
Some of them were new to me:
– Moving paragraphs (never needed this)
– Applying styles and formatting as you type
– Applying list levels as you type
– Inserting a non-numbered paragraph into a numbered list
– Superscript and Subscript (with varying key combinations in other applications, for example Ctrl + H, Ctrl + T in the german version of WinWord 1.1a, there paragraph adjustment Ctrl + L, Ctrl + Z, Ctrl + R and Ctrl + B according to the german translations (hoch, tief, linksb~A 1/4 ndig, zentriert, rechtsb~A 1/4 ndig, Blocksatz))
– Moving objects and images
The article was an interesting inspiration to me. Allthough I do most of my text processing stuff with LaTeX, I have several customers using OpenOffice who will be glad about a hardcopy of this article.
Still most important: Ctrl + S; reason: “I didn’t know I have to save my documents, I thought the PC would take care of them by itself.”
Amen to that. Bring back the keyboard short-cuts. The mouse has it’s place, but I the keyboard in many situations is far more efficient.
I’d love to see some regular articles on OSAlert about keyboard shortcuts with cheat sheets.
For fullscreen, you can type (SHIFT)(CTRL)(J).
Sometimes the best GUI–is no GUI.
Edited 2008-06-26 21:36 UTC
They forgot that one.
In OpenOffice? What exactly does it do?
Ctl-Alt-Backspace is cool on unix-like OS’s. It helps unclutter your screen. ;}
Well, that’s common knowledge in UNIX / Linux world.
When I press Ctrl-Alt-Del in OpenOffice, a system terminal (root) pops up. Is this a new OpenOffice feature? Or is it a bird? Or an airplane? No, it is Heinz, the meteor! No, of course not, it’s just a simple setting in WindowMaker’s keyboard control dialog. Any key combination can gain priority and activate a WM function or an external program just as you wish.
To complete stupidity at this point, I think Ctrl-Alt-Del is so important that there are even keyboards for this key combination:
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/ctrl-alt-del.jpeg
And because we’re talking about keyboards right now, don’t miss the StupidaKeyboard:
http://www.myl.ro/forum/sources/Gallery/display.php?t=f&id=247&ext=…
Sometimes, I would be glad to hand such great equipment to certain kinds of users.