OpenOffice.Org: Change Default Font

If you are a user of the OpenOffice.org suite, a free and open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, than you might have noticed the default fonts. Personally, I would like to change the fonts used by default. So I visited the official web site at OpenOffice.org to figure out how to change the defaults.

Little to my surprise, the directions on their site are a bit outdated. Here are the correct directions to change the default fonts.

From the Tools menu, choose Options... In the left hand menu, click the arrow in front of OpenOffice.org Writer option. Choose Basic Fonts (Western). In the right part of the window, choose the default font from the dropdown menu next to Default. You can also set the default font size from the dropdown menu provided.

The option to change the font and font size for heading, list, caption, and index are also available.

Note: If you wish to change the default for the current document only, there is a checkbox for this on the page. This is really a good option to have if the current document contains many pages and you wish to change the defaults across the document. Otherwise, this option is most likely best left unchecked.

ClickOK.

Unlike some other software available, it appears to me here under Ubuntu Linux, the change in default font and font size appear to take affect as soon as you click OK. You can see this in the font selector dropdown menu in the Formatting toolbar. If this does not happen for you, you might need to Close down OpenOffice.org Writer and re-open the program. The default font will now be set to your desired default.

If you are looking to change the default font in other programs bundled in OpenOffice.org such as Calc, the team over at OpenOffice.org in their infinite wisdom, made this option unavailable and can only be changed by creating a template and setting that template as the default. This is not exactly the ideal setup to me, as Microsoft has been offering this feature for many versions now and one would think this would be an easy item to implement in what is touted as the Microsoft Office alternative.