Seeing Some Action

You make things happen in OOo by clicking the mouse buttons. Throughout this book, "click" means a left-button click, and "right-click" means a right-button click. If you have a scroll wheel, you can use it to scroll.

Some commands are given using keystroke combinations, such as holding down the Ctrl key while you press the F1 key. This combination would be shown as Ctrl-F1. You will also learn, as you go along, that keyboard shortcuts exist for almost every "point-and-click" mouse command in OOo. For example, instead of clicking the Spellcheck icon, you can press the F7 key to open the Spellcheck window.

You can get a complete list of keyboard shortcuts by selecting Tools > Customizeand this shows you another bit of jargon you'll see in this book. Tools is a menuin this case at the top of your OOo window. When you click Tools, a menu drops down, and one of the choices on it is Customize. The command Tools > Customize is shorthand for "First select Tools, and then select the Customize menu option." The videos make this clearer; some actions are easier to show than to tell.

Another action you might read about is the mouseover. This is what happens when you move the mouse cursor over a word or button and something happens. One example of this is the little text box that appears next to any button (also called an icon) if you move the cursor over it but don't click it. That text box tells you what that button (or icon) does.