OpenOffice.org Impress tips from the trenches
2011-01-15
by Olivier Cleynen
by Olivier Cleynen
Annotated tips that might save someone time.
To have your items (eg. bullets in lists) appear one by one, the most efficient way is to select them all at once, add appear custom animation, and then indicate Start: on click.
In this way there is no need to set-up a custom animation for each of them (and they will each appear on click during the talk).
Modify a toolbar (View > Toolbars > Customize) to add three or four alignment buttons. Centering images or moving text on the sides is both faster and less frustrating.- Use Styles and Master Pages. Start using them today. The later you start, the more work it’ll cost to switch.
- Styles (Format > Styles and Formatting) define the styling of paragraphs, just as in Writer or Calc. You should focus on Title, Subtitle (ordinary text), Outline 1 and 2 (for bullet points).
Each master page has its own ensemble of styles. [AFAIK] It’s not possible to copy styles from a master page to another.
Note that language is defined together with font (a long-time OO.o idiosyncrasy). - Master pages (View > Master > Slide Master) define where the styles are laid out on the slide.
Each master slide can be laid out in a multitude of [useless] ways using the Layout tab on the docked task pane. AFAIK it is neither possible to assign a default layout to a given master, nor the opposite.
If you are not interested in bullet points and (rightly) only want ordinary centered text on your slide, edit the Subtitle style to your needs, even if cannot visualize any example text for it. When using that ordinary-text-only master, pick the Title slide layout. - The Click to add text boxes might repeal you (I hated them) but they will now save you countless hours. Soon you will refuse to do without.
- It is not worth creating new styles inside master pages, for you will have to assign them to text manually all along. Just edit the existing ones.
- Styles (Format > Styles and Formatting) define the styling of paragraphs, just as in Writer or Calc. You should focus on Title, Subtitle (ordinary text), Outline 1 and 2 (for bullet points).
- If you set a background picture, do not use PNG, for it’ll hog the already sluggish thumbnail generation. Quit (rightly) ranting about how superior the format is and use JPEG instead.
- Impress does not handle large files very well. Once you exceed fifty 1 MB photos you will save time by splitting your presentation in multiple files.
To get a clean multiple-slides-per-page handout, make a normal, one-page-per-slide export to PDF, and edit the PDF with an external program (Impress just isn’t good at that). On Ubuntu, evince does a wonderful job printing PDF files to new PDFs, re-arranging layout in the process.
Working daily with Impress (I work with several thousand slides) isn’t without some amount of swearing and requires patience. But then I remember here is a freedom-respectful tool that, in perspective, allows me to do extraordinary things, and earn my living. Given by a community. For free.
Thank you, OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice people.