If you use a lot of graphics in your OpenOffice.org documents, you’re probably in a love/hate relationship with the built-in graphics Gallery.
Love to access the graphics, hate the space that the gallery eats up on your screen….
Well, to be truthful, the problem with the space it takes, is that my monitor is wide-screen and to have the space for the gallery taken from the vertical direction just makes everything feel “squished”.
For me, it makes more sense to have things set out side-by-side, since that’s where I have the most room to fill.
Unfortunately, OpenOffice.org didn’t see things that way… or did they?
Actually, you do have choices when it comes to the location of the Gallery when it’s displayed, so let’s take a look at what’s available to us.
To start out, you need to know that re-locating the Gallery is done with the old drag and drop trick.
(Yes, I said drag and drop, it really is that easy.)
At the top of the Gallery, you’ll see a gray bar that displays the path and file name for the currently selected graphic.
Click, hold and drag that bar into your document.
When you release the mouse button, the Gallery should now be displayed as a floating pane in its own little window, over your document.
Don’t care for that option either? Dislike the time spent moving the Gallery out of your way?
No problem.
Here’s another idea:
Instead of dragging the Gallery into the document try dragging it to the left or right of your screen.
You’ll find that the Gallery is docked at the side just like the panes you’re used to seeing in Microsoft programs.
Whichever way you finally decide you prefer things, you’ll be happy to know that the next time you open it in any of the OpenOffice.org programs, it will be just as you left it… floating or docked on the side… the one change affects all programs.
Maybe this will put a little more love in that love/hate relationship between the two of you.
~ April
If the Gallery is taking up too much room at the top OR the side of the open window, you can hide it. Just click on the short line of dots immediately to the top of the ruler, and it will disappear. Click again on the same dots to have it show again.
The Gallery can also be resized by left-clicking on the middle line above the dots and dragging it to the desired size.
I’d like to be able to create Gallery objects with Open Office Draw. I actually tried to do this before I discovered TinyCAD, hoping to make a library of schematic symbols I could insert into drawings. Architects and other users would certainly find this a convenient way to access user-defined basic shapes and symbols.