Sams Teach Yourself StarOffice® 5 for Linux in 24 Hours

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Hour 19: Creating Presentations with StarImpress

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Creating Individual Slides


After you have a layout or presentation template onscreen, you're ready to enter the information that you actually want to present.

StarOffice uses a layout for each slide to simplify and organize the placement of text and objects on the slide. You can add information in other locations, but the layouts make basic text entry much easier.

Adding a Layout to a Slide

If you used either the New Presentation icon or a background layout from the set of Presentation Layouts, your screen shows a blank or graphical slide with no indication of how to proceed. Choose Slide Layout from the Format menu. The Modify Slide dialog box appears. (See Figure 19.11.)

Figure 19.11
The Modify Slide dialog box contains graphic representations of content styles that can be applied to the current slide.

From the set of AutoLayout pictures, click on the one that matches how you want the current slide to look. For example, if you want a single headline with bullets underneath (a common choice), click on the middle picture in the second row.

Other choices indicate slides that include text in columns, charts, graphics, tables, and every combination of these elements. Completely empty slides (totally or in part) can be used to provide space for other creative things that you want to do with imported objects or with the drawing tools (see Hour 20, "Adding Graphics and Charts to Your Presentation").

When you've selected the best layout, click OK. The current slide now includes the layout that you selected (see Figure 19.12).

Figure 19.12
An AutoLayout applied to a slide provides guided areas for you to enter information on a slide.

The AutoLayout areas show you what to do next. Each block in the layout includes an instruction to Click and add a title, double-click to add a document or chart, or something similar.

Note - If you don't use one of the areas in the AutoLayout, the instructions and outlined boxes that you see onscreen do not appear in your slide presentation. They are only there as a reference while you enter information.


You can use the Slide Layout dialog box at any time to change the layout of the current slide. StarOffice tries to fit any existing text into the areas on the newly-selected layout.

Inserting a New Slide

As you create your presentation, you'll need to add new slides for each topic. Even if you used the AutoPilot or a presentation template, you might need to insert an additional slide or two.

To add a slide, choose Slide from the Insert menu. The Insert Slide dialog box appears. In this dialog box, select the layout of the slide that you want to insert. (This dialog box looks just like the one used to modify the layout of an existing slide.)

Tip - New slides are always inserted after the current slide.


After a slide is inserted, you can add and edit text on it just like any other slide in your presentation.

Entering Text on a Slide

With the helpful hints scattered throughout the slide layouts, entering information on a slide isn't very challenging. The large-type instructions such as Click to add title, for example, don't leave much to the imagination.

After you have entered text, you can click on any block of text to select that block and begin editing it. A cursor in the block of text indicates that it can be edited. (See Figure 19.13.)

Figure 19.13
Text within a slide can be edited by clicking on the text. The block is selected, and an editing cursor appears.

The green handles around the text block can be used to adjust the block in which the text sits. You can do any of the following:

Caution - The layouts have all the text boxes centered and aligned. Dragging them to a new location on the slide might not work well with graphics or background elements on the slide.


Adjusting Paragraphs

Each slide within a presentation is almost like a separate document. Text doesn't flow from slide to slide like pages in a word processing document. Instead, text is arranged in individual paragraphs. Each paragraph is one of the blocks of text that you click on to add or edit text. If the paragraph is too long for the slide, the extra text is cut off and won't appear in your presentation.

For example, in many slides the title of the slide is one paragraph and the bulleted list that follows is a second paragraph.

Because these paragraphs reside in text boxes that can be moved or adjusted with the green handles described in the previous section, paragraphs in a presentation don't have margins. You just move and resize the text box to the location on the page where you want the text.

You can, however, set up some features of each paragraph of text. With a block of text selected (with a heavy outline and green handles around it), select Paragraph from the Format menu. The Paragraph dialog box appears (see Figure 19.14), but with three tabs instead of the eight tabs that appear when you're working in a StarWriter word processing document.

In the Indents and Spacing tab, you can set up automatic indents for lines in the selected block of text. You can also define if text is single- or double-spaced. These options are useful for larger blocks of text, which don't frequently occur within slides.

In the Alignment tab (see Figure 19.15), you can define the current block of text as center-, left-, or right-justified. This is very useful for titles and some summary information.

Figure 19.14
Each block of text on a slide can be edited from the Paragraph dialog box.

Figure 19.15
The Alignment tab enables you to center-justify text in the current paragraph.

Finally, in the Tabs tab (see Figure 19.16) you define tab stops for each of the lines of text in the paragraph. This is used for setting up columns of figures or tables within a block of text.

Figure 19.16
Tab stops can be used to set up table-like formats or columns, figures, or names. An embedded spreadsheet can often replace these options, however.

Because StarOffice enables you to import charts from spreadsheets and to include mini-spreadsheets, setting a lot of tab stops won't often be necessary.

Setting Font Options

Reasonable font choices are part of the pre-defined layouts and templates in StarOffice. However, if you want to change fonts or add effects as you do in a word processing document, it's easy to do.

To select a block of characters that you want to format, first select the entire paragraph that contains the characters. With a paragraph selected and a cursor in that paragraph, you can use the arrows keys with the Shift key, or drag your mouse pointer, to select words that you want to reformat.

With characters selected within a paragraph, choose Character from the Format menu. The Character dialog box appears (see Figure 19.17).

Figure 19.17
Individual characters or words can be formatted within a slide using the Character dialog box.

Using this dialog box, you can choose a font and font size, and standard or advanced font effects.

You remember from previous hours that most of the character formatting tools appear on the Object toolbar whenever you start editing text. For example, when text is selected within a slide, you can perform any of the following actions from the Object toolbar:

Using the Object toolbar is often the most convenient way to format text, but not everything can be done from the toolbar. Some formatting, such as indents and superscripts, are generally done in the Character dialog box.

Sams Teach Yourself StarOffice® 5 for Linux in 24 Hours

ContentsIndex

Hour 19: Creating Presentations with StarImpress

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