how 2 create keyboard shortcuts in StarOffice

This one came about because a foreign language teacher needed a way to quickly type special characters while using StarOffice. In microsoft office, there is an option to assign a keyboard combination to a special character in the INSERT-->SYMBOL menu item. But this option does not exist in StarOffice.

One option is to download any of several plugins that are available for StarOffice (StarOffice is Sun Microsystem's version of Open Office - our school has a strong partnership with Sun, which is why we use StarOffice). However, this is less than satisfactory because most users in a school environment don't have the network rights needed to install a plugin, and even if you can install the plug in, you need to find a plugin that does exactly what you want every time you discover an exotic need, plus, you're stuck with whatever keyboard combination that programmer thought was good - if you do it for yourself, you have total control over the choices.

So here's how to do it for yourself:

RECORD A MACRO:
1. Open the writer application.
2. Go to Tools--> Macro--> Record Macro
a little box will appear that says recording is happening.
3. Do whatever action(s) you want to assign to the keyboard code (in this case, go to the Insert-->Special Character menu and choose the symbol you need)
4. Click the little box to stop recording and you will be shown a save dialog. Give it a descriptive name and make sure you save in MyMacros>>Standard>>Module 1 so that this will be available for every document you create.

CREATE THE KEYBOARD CODE
5. Go to Tools-->Customize
6. Click on the Keyboard tab
7. In the Category list box, scroll down to StarOfficeMacros>>user>>Standard>>Module1 and you will see your macro you just recorded in the list. Click on it one time to select it.

8. Scroll through the list of possible keyboard combinations in that window, and click on the one you would like to use (it's ok if something else is in it. Click on it one time to select it, and click LOAD.


The really cool thing is that you can do this for ANY task or chunk of typing that you do frequently.......even a series of tasks. Anything you can do in OpenOffice, you can record to a macro, and you can assign any macro to a keyboard shortcut.