Sams Teach Yourself StarOffice® 5 for Linux in 24 Hours |
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Hour 20: Adding Graphics and Charts to Your Presentation |
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In this hour you learn how to add additional graphical elements to your StarOffice presentations, beyond those provided by the StarOffice presentation templates.
Within a StarOffice presentation, you can add clip-art graphics, draw your own graphics, import graphics files, or use charts created in a StarCalc spreadsheet. In this hour you learn how to do each of these things.
Graphics are an important part of any slide presentation. With only bulleted lists, any presentation rapidly becomes a chore for both presenter and audience. With colorful graphics that illustrate your points, however, everything becomes more interesting.
StarOffice uses graphics in slides much as it does in word processing documents and spreadsheets. The sections that follow describe how to use the basic graphics features within your presentation slides.
Any graphics file can be imported into a slide by following these steps:
1. Move to the slide on which you want to insert a graphic.
2. Set the viewing mode to Drawing (from the Master View submenu under the View menu).
3. Select Picture under the Insert menu, and then choose From File on the Picture submenu. The Insert Picture dialog box appears. (See Figure 20.1.)
Figure
20.1
A graphic can be imported into a slide from the Insert Picture dialog box.
Note - You can also use StarDraw or Image Editor tools to draw a separate picture within a slide. Use of these drawing tools is described later in this hour. |
Any image that you import into a StarImpress presentation can be moved and sized to fit the slide you're creating.
To work with an image, it must first be selected. Select an image by clicking on it; green handles appear around the object when it is selected.
Tip - If you don't see a regular arrow-shaped mouse pointer, you can't select objects on a slide. Choose the Arrow icon on the Main toolbar (usually on the left side of the screen). |
After an object is selected, you can manipulate it in several ways:
Click on the middle of the object and drag it to a new location.
Click and drag a corner of the object (on a green handle) to change the size of the object (up or down). Hold down the Shift key as you do this to keep the ratio correct (to avoid distorting the image).
Click the right mouse button or go to the Format menu to see all the formatting options available for the imported image, including 3D effects and slide show actions.
For most bitmapped graphics that you import into a StarImpress presentation (in formats such as TIFF, GIF, and BMP), you can use the Image Editor to edit the imported graphic directly.
To use the Image Editor, right-click on a selected graphic and choose Image from the pop-up menu. Choose Edit from the Image menu that appears.
When you choose Edit from the Image menu, the bitmapped image appears in a heavy border and a different set of image manipulation tools appears in the Main toolbar (see Figure 20.2). The resolution of the image might also change so that you see only a portion of the graphic.
Figure
20.2
Bitmapped graphics within a slide can be edited in the Image Editor.
Table 20.1 describes the image manipulation tools provided on the Main toolbar when you start to edit a bitmapped image.
Note - If you click and hold on some of the image manipulation tools in the Main toolbar (Zoom, Image, Color, or Effects), a fly-out set of icons appears; you can then select options related to that tool. Hour 6, "Creating Graphics with StarDraw," describes these fly-out menus in more detail. |
You can resize the image by using the mouse in the corner of the window. Changing the size of the Image Editing window doesn't make the image larger after editing, it just gives you more space to view the image during editing.
When you are done editing a graphic in the Image Editor, click the mouse somewhere else on the slide (not in the image window). The Image Editor closes, leaving the edited image in place on your slide.
Graphics in presentations have a special linking feature that makes them especially useful. A slideshow is often viewed on-line, whereas a spreadsheet or word processing document is almost always viewed on paper.
When you add a graphic to a slide, the graphic can be live. That is, it can have an action associated with it so that when you run a slide show, clicking on the graphic causes a certain action to occur in the slide show. This is similar to having a programmable button that you define on a slide.
To use this feature, follow these steps:
1. Import a graphic into your slide.
2. Select the imported graphic by clicking on it so that you can edit its properties.
3. Choose Interaction from the Presentation menu. The Interaction dialog box appears. No action is selected, so the dialog box isn't much to look at right now.
4. Click on the drop-down box and select an action to associate with clicking on this graphic. The choices include the following:
For example, if you choose Go to page or object, the dialog box changes to show the options from which you can select (see Figure 20.3).
Figure
20.3
When you select an Interaction for a graphic on a slide, you must define the
parameters of that action.
The slide titles in a presentation can be listed so that you can choose which slide to go to when the selected graphic is clicked.
Caution - Some of the choices in the Interaction dialog box are only relevant in the Windows version of StarOffice, even though they are still listed in the Linux version. |
5. Choose OK to close the Interaction dialog box.
When you start a slide show (see Hour 21, "Formatting and Giving Your Presentation"), you can click on the graphic that you imported to execute the action that you selected in the Interaction dialog box.
Sams Teach Yourself StarOffice® 5 for Linux in 24 Hours |
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Hour 20: Adding Graphics and Charts to Your Presentation |
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