Options for All

All of the OpenOffice.org programs provide their own set of options so that you can customize the program to suit the way you work. For example, if you are using Draw on an older computer, your drawing has to update when you add or change a shape on your screen. If you have one or more three-dimensional objects in the drawing, the screen update can be very slow. Therefore, Draw offers an option whereby you can display an image icon and frame, instead of the image itself, everywhere the image appears in your drawing. Once you've positioned all your images onto the drawing area, you can turn the graphic display back on to review the drawing.

NOTE

The images always print even if you've chosen to suppress their display on the screen.

Throughout this book's tasks , you'll find descriptions of each OpenOffice.org program's options that you can modify. For example, 106 Set Draw Options explains all the Draw options and why you may want to change some of them.

From any individual OpenOffice.org program, you can program specific options, as well as global options. These global options determine how all the OpenOffice.org programs behave and appear as you use OpenOffice.org. Because these general options are generic across all the OpenOffice.org programs, this would be a good time to review them. Doing so not only makes sense because these options are global in scope and the tasks in the chapters that follow are specific to individual OpenOffice.org programs, but also reading about the general OpenOffice.org options will give you an early feel of what OpenOffice.org is all about.

Table 1.1 describes the 6 general OpenOffice.org option categories from which you can select. From any OpenOffice.org program, you only need to select Tools, Options from the menu and click the plus sign to expand the OpenOffice.org entry to see the numerous global option categories.

Table 1.1. OpenOffice.org Option Categories

OpenOffice.org Option Category	Explanation
OpenOffice.org	Describes general settings for all OpenOffice.org programs, such as your user information, path settings, and accessibility settings.
Load/Save	Describes how you want to load and save documents. For example, you can request that a backup copy of the previous version of any document is saved every time you save a file.
Language Settings	Defines the default language used by the OpenOffice.org programs as well as how you want writing aids to work, such as correcting the misuse of upper- and lowercase characters .
OpenOffice.org Base	Describes general settings for external data sources you use in OpenOffice.org documents and tables.
Charts	Describes basic chart color settings for charts you insert in documents.
Internet	Describes how you want OpenOffice.org to interact with the Internet, such as which search engines you want OpenOffice.org to use.

The following figure shows the options available in Writer. As you can see, there are global options as well as Writer-specific ones.

Review the OpenOffice.org option categories.