Sams Teach Yourself StarOffice® 5 for Linux in 24 Hours

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Hour 19: Creating Presentations with StarImpress

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Saving Your Presentation


Although this topic is listed last in this hour, you need to save your presentation with a unique name before you enter the first line of text on the first slide.

To save a presentation, use the Save As item on the File menu. The now-familiar Save As dialog box appears. (See Figure 19.18.)

Figure 19.18
The Save As dialog box enables you to choose a new name for the presentation that you're creating.

Enter a name for your file and select the directory to which it will be saved. Then choose the Save button.

After you save your presentation with a name, you can quickly update your saved presentation on disk at any time with a keystroke: Ctrl+S.

Tip - StarImpress 5.0 is the default format. If you need to read this presentation in another program, export it to another format, as described in the next section.

Exporting Slides in Graphics Formats

Despite our interest here, StarImpress is not a well-known presentation format. If you need to work with your presentation in another program, plan to export your presentation in another format.

For both text documents and spreadsheets, the StarOffice Save As dialog box includes several formats from which you can choose. For example, a text document can be saved as a Word 97 or an RTF file.

Presentations use the Export dialog box instead of the Save As dialog box. Exporting in a graphics format such as GIF, BMP, or JPEG creates a single graphics file for the currently-displayed slide.

To create a graphic version of a slide, follow these steps:

1. Choose Export from the File menu. The Export dialog box appears; this dialog box looks just like the Save As dialog box except for the default directory and the file types available.

2. Select a graphics format from the File Type drop-down list.

3. Enter a filename for the slide that you are exporting as a graphic (by default, the correct graphics file extension is added automatically).

4. Choose Save. For most formats, another dialog box appears and asks questions specific to the selected graphics format. For example, Figure 19.19 shows the BMP-specific dialog box.

Figure 19.19
Exporting a slide as a BMP graphic opens a dialog box with graphics-specific questions.

5. Answer the questions in the dialog box (if one appears) and choose OK to complete the export process.

Note - Exporting a graphic can take several seconds. Don't worry if StarOffice seems to pause for a while.

Exporting as a Web Presentation

Although StarOffice can't export presentations in PowerPoint format, it can export in HTML format, so your presentation can be viewed in any Web browser.

Exporting in HTML creates a set of files with names based on the name you enter as an export filename. To export a presentation in HTML format, follow these steps:

1. Choose Export from the File menu. It doesn't matter which slide you're viewing when you choose Export in this case because the entire presentation is exported.

2. In the Export dialog box, choose HTML from the File Type drop-down list.

3. Enter a filename for the HTML document.

Caution - Make the first part of the filename that you enter recognizable. Because each slide is a separate HTML file, StarOffice creates many filenames based on the name that you enter, chopping off part of it and adding numbers to the end of each filename.


4. Choose Save. The HTML Export dialog box appears (see Figure 19.20).

5. Choose a resolution for the graphic part of the HTML pages (the slides themselves). The higher the resolution, the larger the graphic image files are.

6. Choose OK to finish exporting to HTML.

When you have finished exporting, you can use a browser, or StarOffice, to read the first file of the set of HTML documents for your presentation.

For example, if you name your exported file Travel, StarOffice names the Contents page Travel_0. The first slide is Travel_1, which you can load as shown in Figure 19.21. Notice that a Continue link takes you to the next slide. (Low resolution has been used for these files so that they fit onscreen in StarOffice.)

Figure 19.20
Exporting an HTML version of a presentation enables you to choose from several options.

Figure 19.21
Each slide in a presentation exported to HTML includes a Continue link to go to the next slide.

If you use a longer filename, StarOffice might cut off the end of the filename as each slide graphic file is created.

Sams Teach Yourself StarOffice® 5 for Linux in 24 Hours

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Hour 19: Creating Presentations with StarImpress

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