Sams Teach Yourself StarOffice® 5 for Linux in 24 Hours

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Hour 21: Formatting and Giving Your Presentation

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Hour 21
Formatting and Giving Your Presentation

In the last two hours you learned how to format and work with individual slides. This hour explains how to arrange and work with all the slides in a presentation: arranging them, defining transitions, and so on.

This hour describes how to set up and run your presentation as a slide show and how to prepare printed handouts of various styles to accompany or replace a stand-up slide show presentation.

Arranging Your Slides


As you prepare a presentation, you often want to rearrange the slides that you've prepared into a different order, or to at least get a feeling for their overall order and flow.

StarImpress provides several master views that make it easy to see all your slides, and to rearrange or sort them as needed.

Tip - The templates provided by StarImpress use Arial and Times New Roman fonts (leftovers from the Windows version of StarOffice). These are mapped to bitmapped fonts in Linux, which look terrible onscreen--especially if you increase their size. To fix this problem, change Arial fonts to Helmet and Times New Roman fonts to Timmons. (Other scalable fonts include charter, arioso, chevara, conga, and helmet condensed.)

Choosing a Master View

When you start a new presentation, StarImpress displays it in Drawing view. This view shows a single slide that fills the working area. All the drawing tools are available, and all the graphics, text, and other components of a slide are displayed as they will appear during a slide show. (See Figure 21.1.)

Figure 21.1
The default view for slides is the Drawing view, showing one slide with all its graphics and text.

The advantage to the Drawing view is that what you see onscreen is how the actual slide will look.

Tip - If you're using StarOffice to create a single graphical project such as a flyer or invitation, you'll probably only need the Drawing view. The other views described in this section are intended for multi-slide presentations.

Moving Between Slides

When you have multiple slides in your presentation and you're using the default Drawing view, you can use any of several methods to move between slides.

The easiest way to move to the next slide is to press Page Down. Pressing Page Up moves you to the previous slide.

Two other methods are also available for selecting which slides to view. At the bottom of the viewing area, StarOffice displays a tab for each slide, as well as navigation arrows. Either of these can be used to change which slide you are viewing.

The tabs at the bottom of the screen each contain the name of a slide. Clicking on one of these tabs displays the named slide. (See Figure 21.2.)

Figure 21.2
You can use slide tabs to move the Drawing view to a different slide.

The navigation arrows can be used to move to the next slide in either direction by clicking on one of the middle two arrows, right or left. Or, you can click on the far left or right arrow to move to the first or last slide, respectively. (See Figure 21.3.)

Figure 21.3
The navigation arrows enable you to move to the previous or next slide, or to the first or last slide in your presentation.

Note - Don't confuse these navigation arrows to the left of the slide tabs with the scroll bars on the right side of the slide tabs. The scroll bars and accompanying arrows only adjust the view of the current slide.

Using the Background Mode

While viewing slides in the Drawing view, you can choose to view just the text and graphics that you've entered, or you can view the background description of what the slide contains.

For example, the background mode contains bulleted items that you click to fill in or outlines of areas that are intended for graphics.

Background mode is useful if you're just learning how information is arranged on a template. Figure 21.4 shows how the background mode displays a slide in the Drawing view.

Figure 21.4
Background mode displays the areas in which text or graphics can be placed. The words that you see are not part of the slide--they only act as guides during data entry.

You can choose background mode by selecting Background from the View menu, and then choosing Drawing from the Background submenu. Return to the regular slide mode by selecting Slide from the View menu.

Tip - You can also use the buttons below the slides and to the left of the navigation arrows to choose slide mode or background mode. These are shown in Figure 21.5. (Another button, used to display Layers, is next to these buttons. It operates independently of them, but using layers is not described in this book.)


Figure 21.5.
The Slide mode and background mode can be quickly selected from the buttons below a slide in the Drawing view.

Selecting Other Views

Four other Master views are available to help you prepare and visualize your presentation. Any of these Master views can be selected by choosing Master View from the View menu and making a selection from the Master View submenu. The Drawing view was described in the previous section; following is a description of each of the other views:

Figure 21.6
Outline view displays all the titles and text of your slides in a single text flow, like an outline in a word processor.

Caution - Remember that graphics on your slides are not displayed in the Outline view. Be certain that you view the slides full-screen in Drawing view or a practice slide show to see how your edits have affected the slides.


Figure 21.7
The Slide Sort view displays as many slides as possible on a single screen. This view is ideal for rearranging slides.

Figure 21.8
The Notes view shows your slide with presenter's notes below.

Figure 21.9
The Handout view enables you to see how your slide handouts will look.

You can also select from among these viewing options by using the buttons on the right edge of the screen above the vertical scroll bar. The icons are small, but if you leave the mouse pointer over an icon, a pop-up description tells you which view is selected. Click on any of these icons to select a view. (See Figure 21.10.)

Figure 21.10
You can select a view by clicking on one of the view buttons located on the right edge of the display.

Sams Teach Yourself StarOffice® 5 for Linux in 24 Hours

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Hour 21: Formatting and Giving Your Presentation

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