Addressing envelopes in Word and drawing in Writer and Word

Elliptically speaking
When I’m not writing about word processing or Windows, you’ll usually find me woodworking. I don’t know why the letter W has such an important role in my life, but let’s not go there. Anyway, while working wood I needed to draw a small, but perfect ellipse.

There are several ways of doing this. Two pins and a loop of string is probably the best known – and least accurate – but you can also use sliding trammel bars or several laborious geometrical ‘join the dots’ constructions.

A much easier method is to fire up Microsoft Word 2003, turn on the drawing toolbar and use the ellipse tool. What I did was to draw any old ellipse, then right-click on it, Format AutoShape, then set the exact dimensions from the Size tab.

Having done that, I centred it horizontally and vertically to the page, then drew vertical and horizontal guidelines, again centring these. Print, paste on to a piece of wood, and the job is done.

Or so I thought, as my ellipse and lines were a few millimetres smaller than I’d drawn them. After some head scratching, I found that Normal.dot was for some inexplicable reason set to use the US Letter paper size instead of the good old ISO 216 A4 as used by most of the rest of the world. Correcting this and reprinting resulted in perfectly-sized shapes.

A few drawing tips
If you hold down the Shift key as you draw a shape, rectangles are constrained to squares, ellipses to circles and lines snap to directions that are multiples of 15 degrees. Holding down the Control key as you draw creates a shape from the centre to the edge, so a line, for example will end up symmetrical about the point from which you started it.

You can use both keyboard modifiers at once should you want, for example to draw perfect circles from the centre out. Double-clicking on a tool makes it ‘sticky’ so you can draw a load of rectangles, for instance, without having to click on the tool button between each shape.

If you’re using Word 2007, there is no permanently available drawing toolbar. However, if you turn to the Insert tab, then choose Shapes from the Illustrations section, you’ll find a palette of shapes, lines, arrows and so on, much as in the Autoshapes menu in the Word 2003 (and earlier) drawing toolbar.

Having drawn a shape – or selected an existing one – a new ribbon appears titled Format, that offers similar tools to the old drawing toolbar as well as extras such as a standalone size control.

For those working in Openoffice, the process is very much the same, except that you can get to both the size and position on the same dialogue from right-clicking the object. Note that for more sophisticated sketching, Open Office has a separate application – Openoffice.org Draw.