How To Add a Custom Watermark in OpenOffice.org

Adding a printed Watermark into an OpenOffice.org Document takes two steps. First you have to design your watermark in a graphics application and then add it to the document.

Open your favorite graphics tool, mine is G.I.M.P. but yours might be Windows Paint or some other tool.  Choose the text of your watermark, and use the text tool to type it out.   Then rotate the text  40 to 50 degrees so it is noticeable (like the one below).

I set the text color to be 20% grey.  Since this is a graphic and not really a text document, you could use the organizational seal or any other graphical image as a watermark, but you must make the color light enough that the watermark does not interfere with the reader’s comprehension of the document.

Then go to your document in OpenOffice.  My version is OpenOffice.org 3.0 on Windows 2000.

Go to the Format menu, choose “Page” and in the page-format dialog, choose “background.  Then choose “Graphic” instead of “Color” from the “As” dropdown menu.  Browse for your special watermark file.  In this case the file is in the My Pictures folder and is called example-watermark.gif.  Gif format saves files smaller than the same file saved as a BMP.

Once you have chosen the file, set it as either;

“Position” (which lets you place it in one of 9 positions on the page),

“Area” which zooms your picture to fill the available page

or “Tile” which places as many copies of your graphic on the page as will fit.

Your Watermark will then save as part of the document.

You can choose to have an embedded watermark image, in which case it remains static, regardless of how many changes you would like to make in the watermark image, or as a linked image, which will automagically change as you edit the watermark graphic file.

For more information about the differences between Word and OO.o, look at this page: http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/word_processing/Word-to-OOo.html