OpenOffice Writer is one of my favorite programs. However, it surprised me the other day when I wanted to apply a custom hexadecimal color to some text. To my dismay, it seemed like I could only select a color from an already populated array of colors. I could not find any provision for inputing a specific hexadecimal, RGB, or HSL color value. I couldn't even find a custom color picker palette! I did figure out a little workaround, though. The first step is to open Wordpad. Enter some arbitrary text and highlight it. Open the "More colors..." dialog under the text color options. Expand the panel and select/input the custom color you want and click "OK". Copy the now colored text, and paste it into OO Writer. The pasted text should retain the color, then you can edit it as you'd like. Yes, it is a very convoluted workaround for such a simple predicament. Nonetheless, I hope it is useful to someone. I needed it the recently because I needed a text editing feature (drop caps) available in OO Writer, but not Wordpad. Since I don't have Microsoft Word installed, Writer was my only option.