Make Drag and Drop Flowcharts with OpenOffice (2013)

+Random Terrain · October 27, 2013

When a program gets large, it might become hard to hold all of the sections in your mind and that can make it hard to know where new sections should be added. A drag and drop flowchart lets you see the big picture and easily move things around.

The latest program I am working on got too large for me to handle, so I went looking for a freeware drag and drop flowchart maker and the first things that came up were free online tools like gliffy, but I didn't feel like signing up to save my flowcharts and dealing with future problems where they might suddenly start charging for what used to be free. I kept looking and saw a video called Creating a Flowchart in OpenOffice. Duh! I already have OpenOffice on my PC! I didn't know that it could do flowcharts, so I watched the video. Problem is that the video is old and so was my version of OpenOffice. I wanted to see if the latest version of OpenOffice was any better, so I downloaded it. Yep, it's better.

After installing the latest version, just open OpenOffice Draw, plop down a couple flowchart shapes, then select the connector that you'd like to use and apply it. When you move your flowchart shapes, the connectors will magically move with them. Remember that you can un-dock the flowchart tool section and drag it where you want it. You can do the same with the connector tool section. You can resize the page by right clicking on it and selecting Page > Page Setup. After resizing, you can zoom in by selecting Zoom under the View menu at the top.