OpenOffice, the shareware office application suite built in Java, is potentially very useful, but can be a pain in the neck. In this page I’ll collect quick tips and how-tos as I find them.

Docking floating panes in OpenOffice

If you undock the ‘pages’ or ’slides’ pane (and probably others), they’ll keep on floating and it will be impossible to dock them again. Unless, that is, you hold down [CMD](on OS X) / [CTRL](on Windows), then double click with the mouse to the left of the word ‘pages’ (or ’slides’, or whatever is the name of the pane) – not the one on the window bar, but the next one down, with the grey background. A bit tricky, but it works. Obvious, isn’t it? [Source: OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas]

Using layers in OpenOffice Draw

Openoffice’s layers are not like Photoshop’s – think of them more like Excel spreadsheet which you just happen to be able to view at the same time. Use groups instead.
Locking and unlocking layer is particularly time consuming, as it requires quite a lot of clicks. However, you can double click on a layer’s tab to open its properties window – it saves a couple of clicks.
There is a shortcut for hiding / showing a layer, though, namely [SHIFT]-click on its tab.