Minimising the irritation factor of context senstive toolbars

One thing that a colleague had mentioned to me as being the thing that annoyed him most about Open Office is the way that the display jumps around when you have tables in a document. I recognised exactly what he meant today while I was converting over half of my monthly report documents to OOW. It's really irritating! BUT, now I know how to stop it.

So firstly, for those who don't know what I'm on about, when you click into a table in an OOW document, it turns on the context sensitive Table Toolbar. Now, I have my toolbars docked as I don't particularly like them floating over my workspace, so my Table Toolbar is down the left hand side of my screen. However, when this comes on, it takes up some additional space in your application window, so OOW reformats the screen display to recenter your document in the window - generally pushing it to the right by a centimetre. Seriously disconcerting.

But easily fixed! Follow the destructions....

1. View | Toolbars | Customize....
2. Click on the Toolbars Tab
3. Click the "New..." button
4. I called mine PlaceHolder, whatever, give it a name
5. I did add a button to mine (the Toolbars button in fact) but I've just checked and you don't actually even need to have a button, you can just leave it empty.
6. Hit OK to close the customize dialogue.
7. Now, View | Toolbars | select your new toolbar (PlaceHolder in my case)
8. Drag it to the wherever you have docked the context sensitive toolbar that's annoying you (it may not be the tables one after all!), and position it either at the top or bottom (I went for the bottom).
9. Now, the space is already allocated in your application window for a toolbar in that position, so when the Context Sensitive one is activated, your document position doesn't get adjusted. Phew!

Thanks to the Open Office forum for the answer on this one.