So far our spreadsheet is useful, but it’s not very attractive. Let's dress it up a bit.

To improve the looks of the spreadsheet, we'll change the background and font colors of the column heading rows, rotate some headings, insert a logo and a few other things.

The first formatting task is to change the background color of the first row, but before doing this let's stop and take a look at how colors work in OpenOffice.

Usually when you select a color in OpenOffice, you'll choose from a predefined palette of colors. For example, when you choose a font color you will get the standard

OpenOffice color picker, but what if the color you want isn't in the palette? How do you create new colors?

The answer is found under the options command of the tools palette. Expand the OpenOffice.org menu item by clicking on the plus sign - then select the “colors” option.

From this menu you can edit any of the existing colors or add a new color to your palette.

Let's add a new color.

The first thing to do is to enter a new name for your color. We'll name our new color “olive brown” and click add. The new color is then added to the palette. Next, edit the color by clicking the edit button.

You can either pick a new color by clicking on the color in the window, or you can enter values in the input boxes if know what they are.

In this case, we'll pick the new color from the window then click OK.

Now the new color will be available in all OpenOffice programs, when ever you need it.