Sams Teach Yourself StarOffice® 5 for Linux in 24 Hours

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Hour 4: Configuring StarOffice

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Hour 4
Configuring StarOffice

In this hour, you learn how to set options that affect your working environment in StarOffice. That environment includes defining what items are included on your menus and toolbars, as well as special features such as auto-spellchecking.

Options that affect specific document types such as spreadsheets or HTML documents are discussed in the hours that describe working with those document types.

All the global options described in this hour are set from the Tools menu, and most are part of the Configure or Options items.

Changing What's on the Menus and Toolbars


StarOffice provides more flexibility than you will probably ever want. Almost everything you see on the screen can be changed to fit your work environment and preferences.

Two things that you work with regularly can be easily modified: menus and toolbars. Menus and toolbars can be configured to contain exactly the commands and icons that you want to have immediately accessible.

Start by exploring how you can change the StarOffice menus to suit your tastes.

Selecting Menu Items to Display

If you're new to StarOffice, you probably can't imagine why you'd want to change the menu structure--especially because everything you'll see in this book is based on the default menus!

After you've used StarOffice for a while, however, you might find that you want the menus to more closely match another application that you use. Perhaps, for example, you regularly use a command that's hard to access via the default menu structure (maybe it requires you to go through three submenus and a dialog box). In either case, setting up the menus to match your preferences makes StarOffice easier to use.

All the commands used in StarOffice are available as menu items. You can select any of them from a list and position them anywhere in the menu structure.

In fact, you can also write your own programs in StarOffice BASIC (a macro language for StarOffice) and assign custom commands to a new menu item. That, however, is beyond the scope of this book.

To take a look at the menu items, choose Configure from the Tools menu. The menu configuration dialog box opens. Select the Menu tab to see the menu configuration options, as shown in Figure 4.1.

You'll notice a few things in this figure:

Figure 4.1
The Menu tab of the Configuration dialog box shows the commands associated with each menu item.

Tip - The Configuration dialog boxconfigures the menus for the document type that you're viewing. If you want to change the default menus for spreadsheets, open a spreadsheet (even a blank one) before selecting Configure from the Tools menu.


There are hundreds of functions listed in the different categories. When you select an item in the Category list, the Commands list shows commands in that category. You can learn a lot about the functions available in StarOffice by browsing through a few of the command lists.

For example, suppose that each week you create a small newsletter with an index. You update the index several times as you write. Right now, you have to choose this command from the default menus under Tools, Update, All Indexes. If you want to make this command appear at the top of the Edit menu, follow these steps:

1. Open a StarWriter word processor document so that the changes that you make to the menus affect the word processor menus.

2. Choose Configure from the Tools menu and select the Menu tab.

3. In the Category list, scroll down and select Edit. The list of commands changes to show editing commands.

4. In the list of commands, scroll down and select Update Indexes.

5. In the Menu list, scroll down and select ~Edit.

6. Press the New button to insert the command that you selected into the Edit menu.

7. Press the OK button to finish your changes.

8. Click on the Edit menu. The Update Indexes item is listed first (as in Figure 4.2). It's probably gray because you're using a blank document that doesn't yet have indexes to update.

Figure 4.2
The Update Indexes item has been inserted as part of the Edit menu.

Tip - To see a short description of any command in the Command list, click on it and leave your mouse pointer in place for a second. A yellow pop-up description of that command appears. (You must first select Extended Tips from the Help menu for the pop-ups to appear.)

Configuring the Toolbar Contents

Configuring which icons are on the StarOffice toolbars is probably even more useful than customizing your menu items because toolbar icons are always just a mouse-click away.

As you saw in Hour 2, "Getting Started with StarOffice," StarOffice has a lot of toolbars: the Function Toolbar, the Main Toolbar, and the Object Bar, which in turn contains many sub-toolbars. Different versions of these toolbars appear depending on what type of document you're editing and what object is selected in that document.

When you configure these toolbars, you have access to the same complete list of StarOffice functions that is available for defining your own menu items. Each one has an icon of some type assigned to it (you can change those, too).

Defining all the toolbars can get complicated, but the following simple example shows you what you can do; you can explore on your own after that.

Tip - As you practice changing the toolbars or menu items, you might find that you don't like some of the changes that you've made. You can always press the Reset button in the Configuration dialog box to restore the settings to what they were when you first opened the dialog box. Pressing the Default button restores the default StarOffice settings, as if no changes had been made since StarOffice was first installed.


Suppose you create a lot of documents that have tables in them, but you don't like having the Main Toolbar (which includes the Insert Table icon) visible on your screen.

You can easily add the Insert Table icon to the Function toolbar by following these steps:

1. Choose Configure from the Tools menu.

2. Choose the Toolbars tab. The list of toolbars appears, as shown in Figure 4.3.

Figure 4.3
The Toolbars tab of the Configuration dialog box is the starting point for configuring the icons on your StarOffice toolbars.

3. Scroll down in the Toolbars window and click on Function Toolbar. (Notice all the different Object toolbars that are listed--this list changes depending on what you're doing in StarOffice.)

4. Choose the Customize button. The Customize Toolbars dialog box appears (see Figure 4.4).

Figure 4.4
The Customize Toolbars dialog boxenables you to add any command icon to a toolbar by dragging it.

5. Scroll down the Category list and click on Insert.

6. Scroll down the Command list and click on Insert Table. Notice which icon is highlighted in the top part of the dialog box (see Figure 4.5).

7. Click and drag the Insert Table icon from the Customize Toolbars dialog box and drop it on the Function Toolbar (outside the dialog box) in the position where you want it.

8. If you need to move the icon, click and drag it to another location on the Function Toolbar.

9. If you want to remove any icons that are currently on the Function Toolbar, click and drag them off the toolbar, dropping them anywhere on the screen except in the Customize Toolbars dialog box.

10. When you are done modifying the Function Toolbar, close the Customize Toolbars dialog box by clicking on the tiny x in the upper right corner of the title bar.

Figure 4.5
The Insert Table icon is highlighted when you choose it from the Command list.

Tip - If you make a mess of your toolbars during this exercise, choose Default in the Toolbars tab of the Configuration dialog box--the default StarOffice toolbar is restored.


Starting with the Configuration dialog box, each of the toolbars can be configured as this example illustrates.

From the Toolbars tab in the Configuration dialog box, you can also set whether the toolbars display icons (when icons are available), text, or both. Just select an option from the Contents field after you select a toolbar to edit.

The StarOffice toolbars are very flexible. Experiment with the different toolbar options, try changing icons, and move icons around on the toolbars to see how you can set up your environment to fit your work habits.

Setting Which Toolbars Are Displayed

The easy part of setting up your toolbars is deciding which ones you want to display. From the View menu, you can select Toolbars and check or uncheck any of the four toolbars. (See Figure 4.6.)

Figure 4.6
You can select which toolbars to display from the Toolbars item of the View menu.

Menus and toolbars aren't the only things you can set up within StarOffice. The next section describes some of the other global options that you can configure.

Sams Teach Yourself StarOffice® 5 for Linux in 24 Hours

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Hour 4: Configuring StarOffice

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