Drawings

Writer and Spreadsheets share one drawing editor — the same idea as Google Drawings. Use it for a quick diagram, a flowchart, an annotated screenshot or a signature-style sketch. The drawing is saved inside the document or spreadsheet, so it's shared, copied and kept in version history along with everything else.

Adding a drawing

In Writer — Insert ▸ Drawing ▸ New. When you're done, the drawing sits in the text like an image. To change it later, double-click it (or select it and press Enter).
In Spreadsheets — Insert ▸ Drawing. The drawing floats over the grid: drag it to move it, drag its corner to resize it, and double-click it to edit it. Its ⋮ menu has Edit drawing, Download as PNG image and Delete drawing.

Only editors can add or change drawings. Everyone who can open the document sees them.

The editor opens full screen. Save and close puts the drawing into your document; Cancel (or the close button) asks "Discard changes?" if you've changed anything.

What you can draw

The toolbar across the top has:

Select (Esc) — click an object to select it, drag to select several, Shift-click to add to the selection.
Line — Line, Arrow, Curve, Polyline, Scribble, Elbow connector and Elbow arrow.
Shape — six groups: Shapes (rectangles, ovals, triangles, polygons, a heart, a cloud, a smiley face and many more), Stars and banners, Arrows, Callouts, Equation (plus, minus, multiply, division, equal and not equal) and Flowchart.
Text box — click or drag on the page, then type.
Image — Upload from computer (PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP or AVIF, up to 25 MB) or By URL (the address must start with https://).
Word art — large decorative text, typed in a box and placed as an object you can stretch and rotate.

Shapes and text boxes hold text too — double-click one (or select it and press Enter) to type in it.

Styling

With something selected, the toolbar shows what fits it:

Fill color — any color or transparent, with an opacity slider.
Border color, Border weight and Border dash (for lines: Line color, Line weight and Line dash).
Line start and Line end — arrowheads and other end styles for lines.
Text — font, size, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, text color, and alignment (left, center, right or justified; top, middle or bottom).

Arranging

The Actions menu (also on right-click) has:

Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete and Duplicate (Ctrl+D);
Order — Bring to front, Bring forward, Send backward, Send to back;
Align — left, center, right, top, middle or bottom;
Distribute — horizontally or vertically (three or more objects);
Center on page, Rotate (90° either way) and Flip (horizontally or vertically);
Group (Ctrl+G) and Ungroup (Ctrl+Shift+G);
Snap to ▸ Grid / Guides and Show grid;
Page size… and Fit page to content, and — right-click the empty page — Page background… (transparent or white);
Alt text… — a description of the drawing for screen readers. Images inside a drawing can have their own alt text too.

Drag the round handle above a selection to rotate it freely. Undo (Ctrl+Z) and Redo (Ctrl+Y) work across everything you do in the editor, and zoom goes from 10% to 400%, with Fit to show the whole page.

Downloading a drawing

Actions ▸ Download saves the drawing on its own, as a PNG image (.png) or Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg) file. In Spreadsheets, a drawing's ⋮ menu also has Download as PNG image.

Drawings are part of the document when you download it: a Writer document's PDF includes them, and a spreadsheet's PDF, Excel and web page downloads include them as pictures.