The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

Posted Sep 14, 2004 20:45 UTC (Tue) by lamikr (guest, #2289)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

I have tried to use Open Office impress for a couple of time.
I have however not been able to find easy way for adding
tables in the presentation.

I know that there exist in the menu "Insert/spreadsheet"
but this is slow and overkill you want to
insert table simply with text and columns.
(add/edit/resize columns and rows)

Does anybody else found whether this is possible with oo.

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The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

Posted Sep 15, 2004 0:18 UTC (Wed) by denials (subscriber, #3413) [Link]

Well, once you have Impress running you can quickly create a New->Text document, insert a table using CTRL+F12 (or Insert->Table), throw in the text you want, then copy and paste the table into the presentation.

Yeah, it's pretty silly to have to do it that way. But it's relatively quick because there's hardly any overhead to opening a second OpenOffice.org document of any type when the first one is already open.

I just spent a couple of days putting together a presentation for php|works in OpenOffice.org, then received the PowerPoint template from the conference organizer (who said "If you're using ooo Impress then you know how to merge templates"). Needless to say, the new template changed the font sizes and spacing of everything... argh. And I only found the "Fit Text to Frame" button in Impress today, after giving up the search and manually fixing everything. Double-argh. (Trick to future generations: I had to add the Fit to Text button from the Format button set through a customization of the toolbars).

Dan

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

Posted Sep 15, 2004 8:52 UTC (Wed) by lamikr (guest, #2289) [Link]

Thanks for info, now I know that there exist anyway a method for doing this.
At least Impress should contain an one key menu selection short cut
to this feature because I bet that the table editing is in the top 5 of
things you want to do with your presentations.

Mika

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

Posted Sep 16, 2004 17:41 UTC (Thu) by mogul (subscriber, #3163) [Link]

For the love of God, you *must* reveal how to find the "Fit Text to Frame" button in Impress. I've scanned all over the interface and through the help, and found nothing!

A lack of the ability to do this was the one thing that kept me from using Impress regularly... I'm constantly exchanging presentations or updating templates from Powerpoint users and it was just too much work to keep accepting revisions from them and manually updating the layout every time, so I've fallen back to Powerpoint whenever sharing with anyone at work...

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

Posted Sep 15, 2004 0:31 UTC (Wed) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

Maybe this will help?

I fired up Impress but couldn't find any obvious icons or options that should be there according to the tutorial -- before I froze seeing that the OOo developers apparently thought it a good idea to clone that horrible paperclip that still haunts me at night. Back to Latex. ;-)

(On second thoughts: imagine having to typeset Knuth's collected works in Tex, how's that for a nightmare? ;-)