
The Optimal Column Width or Optimal Row Height options make the columns or rows as narrow as possible while still fitting their contents.Selecting Table > Autofit from the main menu also offers some resizing options: You can resize a row or column by holding the mouse button down on the appropriate divider and dragging it to the desired location. On the horizontal ruler, column dividers are marked by a pair of thin gray lines the vertical ruler indicates row dividers in the same way.Move the mouse next to the edge of the cell and when a double-headed arrow appears, click and hold the left mouse button, drag the border to the desired position, and release the mouse button.GitHub: _posts/-openoffice-draw-vs-visio.You can adjust the height of rows and the width of columns in a table in several ways. While neither Visio or OpenOffice try to tackle UML diagrams, I was able to throw some together in Dia, and them import them into Draw. In the end, I was totally satisfied with what I produced in OpenOffice Draw. Draw even has some of its own features, like exporting to PDF. Granted, I'm not a Visio power user, but I'm hard pressed to find anything that Visio does that OpenOffice doesn't do. It just feels like a modern, intuitive application. It's somewhat of a pain to install on Windows, but it was dead simple in Ubuntu just search for "clip art" in the package manager GUI.Īctually using OpenOffice Draw was a blast. However, there is a great royalty free library available called Open Clip Art. By default, OpenOffice has a very limited library. Visio comes with a clip art library that includes various depictions of servers, routers, networks, etc.

The diagrams themselves might be anything from how SMTP traffic flows from our system, over the WAN and back again, to data-center architecture, to the internal workings of a particular piece of code. Would OpenOffice Draw work instead of Visio?Ī typical Visio I might produce is a collection of clip art, shapes, text, connectors and arrows. But, every once in a while, I need to make some diagrams for a feature spec. OpenOffice Writer and Calc have been very competent substitutes for Word and Excel. In an effort to get off of Microsoft Office, I have been trying to use alternatives instead.
