Friday, October 20, 2006

Setting up your OOo default page

Some PC users are too accustomed with the MS Word default page setup (8.5" x 11" page size, 1.25" margin on right and left sides, etc.) that sometimes they get annoyed by the default page in OpenOffice... A4 page size, .79" margins on all sides...

Also, I also found that not all new users to OpenOffice.org knows howto change their default page so let me share my way. I guess there are other means to do this and if you have one, just share it here. Here it goes:

Open OpenOffice Word Processor. You'll notice that the side margins are smaller than the default margins in MSWord. First, you have to format the page by clicking Format --> Page. Then click the drop down beside the word Format to choose Letter. The height and width settings will change accordingly to 8.5" x 11".

Change the left and right margins to 1.20". Personally, .79" top and bottom margins are ok for me. Click OK.

Now you have to save the page as a template. Click File --> Templates --> Save. Give a name to your template, let's use LetterDefault. Click OK.

Now we have to set it as default. Click File --> Templates --> Organize and then double click My Templates. There you see the template you have just saved (named LetterDefault), right click on it then left click on the Set as Default Template. Click Close and that's it!

Close OpenOffice Word Processor (you don't have to save the document you are using). Open it again to see if it works. I hope this helps.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

flash player 9 is out....wahoo!
i love kde...*drool*...

Anonymous said...

Hi Dave,
Thanks for the useful tip. I was going throught he OpenOffice documentation trying to find exactly the same thing!

Unknown said...

thanks for the info. openoffice is great and has improved greatly in the last couple of years. the process for setting the default page seems a little perverse to me - not at all intuitive. i looked through the help documents and looked through all the settings (you would think you could set the default paper format under tools->options ...).

Anonymous said...

Thank you really. I've been using OOo for almost two years and never managed to do it! (well, I didn't search very much..)

Blair D said...

Thank you! I could not find what you explained on the OOo wiki. Even with Open Office 2.4 this was useful as I have now been able to set up my own metric deault template. Brilliant. Thanks again.

Anonymous said...

Ahhh thank you! I've been trying to change the default page settings for ages.

Anonymous said...

Awesome tip! I've been trying to figure this out for a while now.

Eric said...

I've been looking for this everywhere. Thanks!