Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I'm creating a new purchase order template for my company. the one that I've been using, for the last year or so, had a table in the middle for quantity, item, description, price/unit, and total price. there were 6 or 7 rows, and if I needed another, i'd just hit the "add row" icon, and do it manually. Well, my boss & his partner aren't technologically savy like myself, so they wouldn't be able to do this. what i'm trying to have it do is this:

when at the last cell of a row, and i hit the "TAB" button, it will create a new row, then if I hit "TAB" again without any input in the new row, it deletes it and jumps to the next part of the table that I have. I don't even know what to call this type of function, anyone out there who can help?

I would think the easiest thing to do is to have a standard template with a fixed number of 'more rows than you usually need' in the table.

I just fiddled a bit with recording a couple of macros and it worked out surprisingly well.

OOo will let you record most editing steps and save the recorded actions as a "macro". Once you've done that, you can make a toolbar with a button and assign the button to run the recorded steps. It often does not quite work out, but in this case the actions are so simple that it seems to work fairly well. At least you can take a look and see if something like this would work for your invoices.

If you want to try the document, you'll have to configure OOo to allow macros to run. Because macros are programs, there is always some risk that they can cause damage, so OOo does not allow them to run without your allowing it. Go to Tools > Options > Security > Macro Security and change the "Security Level" there to "Medium". That will allow OOo to run macros in any document, but only after asking you.

Edit: PS:

I just noticed that, when you open the sample document for the first time, Writer will do its best to hide the new toolbar. The custom toolbar is buried in with the regular toolbars and it won't have any obvious label. Look at either the left or right end of the main toolbar: you should see two small icons, a yellow "plus" or "start" and a white "x" in a red circle. Click near the left end of that little toolbar and you can drag it out onto the document editing area to make it easier to get to. Right-click on it and choose "Customize Toolbar", then click "Toolbar" and select "Icons and Text" to get the full labels.