Saturday, June 28, 2008

Getting open square bullets in OpenOffice.org

Sometimes it's nice to create a bulleted list with a check box like bullet, e.g., creating a packing list. Seems like in Word there's a quick option for selecting this style of bullets, but not so in OpenOffice. To change a bulleted list to have a check box style bullet:
  1. Select the bulleted list and in the menu go to Format > Bullets and Numbering...
  2. In the dialog that comes up, select the Options tab.
  3. Click the ... button labeled Character. Under Ubuntu, the default font for my document is DejaVu Sans and the subset of characters displayed is the Geometric Shapes. If you scroll up or down a bit, you can see a few different open square type bullets that can be used as check boxes.

3 comments:

Allen Moore said...

Thanks for this tip. I notice, however, that the bullet selection isn't "sticky". The next time I want to create a checklist I have to redefine the bullet format again. This running OpenOffice 3.0.0 Beta on OS X 10.5.4. [(Sigh) I remember how easy it used to be to do checklists on Macs (running Clarisworks on Mac OS 7.x).]

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this great tip!

Allen, it should be possible to make this sticky using a custom style, however copying and pasting a previous bullet point is easy enough to do within the same document. :)

solitone said...

Good to know!