How To Make A Perfectly Centered Title Page In OpenOffice

Trust me, you’ll want to bookmark this one.

Something that always looks good is a perfectly centered title page. And I mean exactly in the center, both horizontally and vertically. Here’s how it’s done:

Step 1

I create a new document, click the double-page view (small icon at extreme bottom right, directly to the left of the zoom slider – I choose the center one). Then I press CTRL+ENTER so I have two pages in view.

Step 2

I click inside the first page so the cursor is blinking at the top left of the page.

This is what it should look like (I zoomed back to 55% so you can see it clearly here):

Step 3

I click Insert and then Frame, like this:

I get a dialog like this:

For now I just click OK. But remember this as we’ll be coming back to it.

Step 4

I now see a box with little green boxes around it, like this:

We need to type in our title. Click outside the box on the page, then inside the box, so you get this:

Now we type in our title:

Above: I type in my text, highlight it and increase font size to 24. However the box is too skinny. I click a border of the box and get my green box markers back, then increate the horizontal size by clicking and dragging the right box to the right.

After that I have this:

Now I drag the bottom in the up direction to get rid of the white space, and get this:

Step 5

Now comes the good part – perfectly centering it on the page!

I right-click a border of the frame and select Frame, like this:

In the Frame dialog, under Position I change Horizontal and Vertical to Center, and each to Entire Page, like this:

Make the four drop-down menus at bottom look exactly like the above screen shot.

But wait – we’re not done yet. Let’s put a nice border around this.

Click the Borders tab and select a 2.50pt border, like this:

Now click OK.

SUCCESS! A perfectly centered title with a border!

Other notes:

• The title text can be centered inside the box. Just highlight and center it as you would a normal paragraph.
• The title text can be changed at any time.
• The size of the box can be changed at any time.
• You can have anything in the box you would on a normal page. This includes a big title and small author name, different colors, etc.