OpenOffice.org — Full-Page Backgrounds in Writer

I personally have found OpenOffice to be a very competent free and open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. I know that it doesn't have the latest features that MS Office does, necessarily, but it certainly has everything that I'd imagine most people need for basic (and not-so-basic) word processing. Of course, it may have the features you want, but it doesn't always have an intuitive way to use them. For instance, in MS Word 2007, you can easily change the color of a document's background by selecting (or mouse-scrolling to) the “Page Layout” tab and then the “Page Color” button in the “Page Background” group (that may all sound complicated, but it's actually not very). In OpenOffice Writer, however, it's not nearly as simple (or obvious). After much searching, I found a work-around that can achieve the same effect:

1. Go to Format > Page > the Page tab and change all of the margins to 0”.
2. Go to the “Background” tab and choose the color you want as the page's background.
3. Go to the “Borders” tab, turn the borders on for all sides by clicking the second-leftmost button under “Line Arrangement” and “Default” on the left.
4. Select the border color.
5. Finally, change the “Spacing to contents” values to the appropriate amount of spacing you want. They take the place of the margins, so if you want the text to be 1 inch from the border, type 1” in each of the textboxes. If “Synchronize” is checked, the value for all four textboxes will change at once, so you only need to enter the value 1” in one of the textboxes.
6. Click “OK”.

Voilà! Your page is beautiful!

If you use full-page backgrounds in Writer fairly often, you can add “Page Settings” (or pretty much any other feature) to the “Standard” toolbar by adhering to the following instructions:

1. Click the down-arrow at the far-right of the “Standard” toolbar (the one with the options “New”, “Open”, “Save”, and others).
2. Click “Customize Toolbar”.
3. Ensure “Standard” is selected in the drop-down box to the right of the words “Toolbar”.
4. Select “Add” on the right.
5. Find the command you wish to place on the Standard toolbar. In this case, you'd go to “Format” under “Category” and “Page Settings” under “Commands”. Press “Close”.
6. At this point, you can drag the newly-added command to where you'd like it, or you can use the up and down arrows to the right of the scrollbox. When you are finished, press “OK”.

source: <http://homepage.ntlworld.com/pesala/Home/html/watermarks.html#Fills>