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How may I align text and numbers in an OOWriter table column?

Asked by Marbux

I'm having trouble finding some setting controls in OOWriter. I have created a 5-column table and its header row. Now I want to set columns so that the text-numbers are horizontally aligned in them in various ways:

a. left aligned
b. right aligned
c. right decimal aligned
d. center aligned

I also wish to set a couple of columns so that text/numbers within them are vertically bottom rather than top-aligned.

But I am unable to find the controls for doing so. Help was no help. I do hope this is feasible. The document is to become a template file for tables with variable numbers of rows for use by many people, so selecting all cells in a column and changing the paragraph style manually for each separate document is not a good solution.

Thank you in advance.

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Jim Hutchinson
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Jim Hutchinson (jphutch) said : 		#1

Yeah, I've never found help documents to be much use with any program. I not sure I can fully answer this. I'm also not sure exactly what you want. You mention horizontal alignment but with columns you usually do vertical alignment (i.e. down the column). Is that what you mean? If so, you can do the left, right and center alignment with the standard alignment buttons. They look like a sheet of paper with lines either left, right or centered. The 4th one justifies both left and right. They are very similar in look to those in Word if you've used that.

The decimal align will be a bit more tricky I think. There may be an easy option for this but the only way I know would be to use a decimal tab. On the very left side of the ruler there is a little tiny icon box. If you click it, it will show you the various kinds of tabs you can use. One of them looks like a an upside down T with a dot. That is for decimal align. Put one of those tabs in the ruler bar of the column you want and then each line of text will need to be "tabbed" to that point to do the decimal align. Move it around until you get it where you want.

Hope that helps.

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Marbux (marbux) said : 		#2

Thank you, Jim. You said, "You mention horizontal alignment but with columns you usually do vertical alignment (i.e. down the column). Is that what you mean?"

I think we're talking about the same thing. In my lingo, that would be horizontal alignment within each cell in the column; i.e., cell contents in a column would all be aligned horizontally. Alignments like left justified, right justified, center justified, and decimal are normally referred to as horizontal alignments rather than vertical.

But I'm looking for a setting similar to WordPerfect's, where you can set the horizontal alignment by column, regardless of how many rows are later added. I can't speak to how or whether Word does it; MS Office has never sullied the honor of my system with its presence. :-)

It may be that neither OOWriter nor Word have such a feature. I'm just hoping here.

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Best Jim Hutchinson (jphutch) said : 		#3

I think what I described will work. I don't know word perfect at all and I'm sorry to say Word has sullied my system (but now I use OO.o). But if you have a table with 10 rows and 5 columns and you select the whole second column, for example (you see a little black arrow pointing down when you hover near the top of any column and if you click it selects the whole column) and click say the center text icon it will center for all text in all rows for that column - even if you later add more rows (by hitting tab from the last cell). If you want something more precise than just left, right, center you can also drag the little triangle-ish shaped things (sorry don't know what else to call them) in the ruler to the position you want. You have to put the cursor in one of the cells for the column you want to work with. They will align text for the whole column and used in conjunction with right or left justify should get you what you want - or at least my understating of what you want. Depending on what it is you are doing, you might also try using the calc spreadsheet. It might align things better for your purpose.

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Marbux (marbux) said : 		#4

Thanks a million, Jim. That worked well enough.

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Marbux (marbux) said : 		#5

Thanks Jim Hutchinson, that solved my question.