During my efforts to slowly switch my entire computing life over to open source software (read "free" if you don't know what that is), I am constantly having to overcome small obstacles to get my new and pretty open source programs working similarly to how I work in proprietary software. This means I spend a lot of time looking for an answer for how to do something once, but that saves me a lot of time later when I actually have to apply it because it already fits my work style. Sometimes, it's an easy switch and sometimes it a real pain.
Today, I found an answer I was looking for as I convert from using Microsoft Office products to the OpenOffice.org office suite. In Excel, there is a feature that is used with the Fill when you highlight a bunch of cells - if you go to the lower, right-hand corner of the selected you get a little plus sign ("+") and from there if you click and drag you automatically fill. This is almost identical to how it works in OpenOffice.org's Calc, except for one small niggle: Fill Format Only.
I use this ALL the time in Excel when I'm trying to get a table looking really nice for print - creating a line of white and line of light gray makes it much easier to follow data across the table. And in Excel, all I have to do is a Fill drag and then select "Fill Format Only" from the little drop down that appears and PRESTO! it's done, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Well, there is no drop down that appears in OpenOffice.org's Calc. Now, you could do this by selecting each row and applying the cell color to each row, but that takes forever when you have a large table. What I learned today is that there is a way to get the same effect and it only takes one more mouse click than in Excel.
Steps:
That's it. The additional mouse click is all it takes. Actually, you can do the exact same thing in Excel using the Format Paintbrush feature - but I had never learned this so for me, it's an additional mouse click.
Today, I found an answer I was looking for as I convert from using Microsoft Office products to the OpenOffice.org office suite. In Excel, there is a feature that is used with the Fill when you highlight a bunch of cells - if you go to the lower, right-hand corner of the selected you get a little plus sign ("+") and from there if you click and drag you automatically fill. This is almost identical to how it works in OpenOffice.org's Calc, except for one small niggle: Fill Format Only.
I use this ALL the time in Excel when I'm trying to get a table looking really nice for print - creating a line of white and line of light gray makes it much easier to follow data across the table. And in Excel, all I have to do is a Fill drag and then select "Fill Format Only" from the little drop down that appears and PRESTO! it's done, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1.Well, there is no drop down that appears in OpenOffice.org's Calc. Now, you could do this by selecting each row and applying the cell color to each row, but that takes forever when you have a large table. What I learned today is that there is a way to get the same effect and it only takes one more mouse click than in Excel.
Steps:
- Select the "reference cells" or the cells whose format you want to copy.
- Click on the Formating Paintbrush icon on the main tool bar (see Figure 2).
- Click and drag over the cells where you want the formating applied.
Figure 2.
That's it. The additional mouse click is all it takes. Actually, you can do the exact same thing in Excel using the Format Paintbrush feature - but I had never learned this so for me, it's an additional mouse click.
No comments:
Post a Comment