OOo Off the Wall: Floating Windows

Floating windows are one of the keys to using OpenOffice.org efficiently. In the same way that the design of OpenOffice.org nudges users towards styles and templates, it also leads them towards using floating windows to manage and apply resources. OpenOffice.org is not the first program to use floating windows; Adobe products such as PhotoShop and Illustrator have used them for years, and FrameMaker uses them for applying styles. No other office program that I am aware of, however, makes them such an essential part of the work flow. And no program of any sort customizes their positioning in the same way that OpenOffice.org does.

A floating window seems simple enough when described. It is a window that can be moved in or out of the editing window, moving over existing material while leaving it untouched. Yet this simple concept is one of the main reasons why--outside of the free software philosophy--OpenOffice.org is my office program of choice.

In OpenOffice.org Writer, four main floating windows are available for managing and inserting content:

In its own area, each of these floating windows quickly becomes essential once you discover it.

The Gallery is a collection of clip art graphics and sounds included with OpenOffice.org. When you select Tools -> Gallery, the Gallery opens at the top of the editing window.

Figure 1. The Gallery Floating Window

Items in the Gallery are organized by folders, also called themes. To find an item, select its theme and then select the item in the pane on the right side of the Gallery. By default, items are displayed as thumbnails, but you can change to the detail view if you prefer to search by files. When you find an item to use, drag and drop it into the document--it's as simple as that.

The default themes are, well, basic would be the polite word. They consist mainly of graphical bullets, buttons, lines and backgrounds suited to a mid-1990s Web site. They can't be edited, either. To add your own graphics or sounds, click the New Theme button. Name the theme on the General tab, and navigate to the files on the Files tab. OpenOffice.org supports a broad array of file formats, so compatibility is rarely a problem. After a theme is created, right-click it and select Properties -> Files to add to its content.

The Data Source window is a floating window available in Writer and Calc. It contains the tools to manage and choose information from all databases, spreadsheets and Mozilla address books that have been added to OpenOffice.org using Tools -> Data Sources. It is opened by clicking View -> Data Sources or pressing the F4 key. It probably is the most underrated of the four floating windows, mostly because relatively few people are familiar with databases.

Figure 2. The Data Source Floating Window

As with Gallery, the Data Source window is docked at the top of the editing window. It is divided into two panes. On the left is a tree view of data sources; this pane is called the Explorer. If you select the plus sign beside a data source, the links, queries and tables for the data source open. You also can edit the available data sources by selecting Administrate Data Sources from the right-click menu.

To view data, select an individual table from the tree view. The records for the table then display in the right pane. The columns in the table are fields in the data source, while the rows are records. If necessary, you can use the buttons in the tool bar for finding, filtering and sorting records.

As in the Gallery, you can select individual cells in the data source window and drag them to the last cursor position in your document. This feature especially is useful when the data source contains information such as contact information or repeated information, including standard language about a company or a product.