This is Chapter 12 of Getting Started with OpenOffice.org 3.x, produced by the OOoAuthors group. A PDF of this chapter is available from Documentation at OpenOffice.org.

Introduction

This Appendix describes some common customizations that you may wish to do.

You can customize menus, toolbars, and keyboard shortcuts in OpenOffice.org, add new menus and toolbars, and assign macros to events. However, you cannot customize context (right-click) menus.

Other customizations are made easy by extensions that you can install from the OpenOffice.org website or from other providers.

Customizations to menus and toolbars can be saved in a template. To do so, first save them in a document and then save the document as a template as described in Chapter 3 (Styles and Templates).

Customizing menu content

In addition to changing the menu font (described in Chapter 2), you can add and rearrange items on the menu bar, add items to menus, and make other changes.

To customize menus:

1. Choose Tools > Customize.
2. On the Customize dialog, pick the Menus page.
3. In the Save In drop-down list, choose whether to save this changed menu for the application (for example, Writer) or for a selected document.
4. In the section OpenOffice.org < name of the program (example: Writer) > Menus, select from the Menu drop-down list the menu that you want to customize. The list includes all the main menus as well as sub-menus, that is menus that are contained under another menu. For example, in addition to File, Edit, View, and so on, there is File | Send and File | Templates. The commands available for the selected menu are shown in the central part of the dialog.
5. To customize the selected menu, click on the Menu or Modify buttons. You can also add commands to a menu by clicking on the Add button. These actions are described in the following sections. Use the up and down arrows next to the Entries list to move the selected menu item to a different position.
6. When you have finished making all your changes, click OK to save them.

The Menus page of the Customize dialog