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Episode: 1795
Title: HPR1795: 54 - LibreOffice Impress - Templates and Master Pages
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1795/hpr1795.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:24:08
---
This is HPR episode 1795 entitled 54 Libra Office Impress Templates and Master Pages and
is part of the series Libra Office.
It is hosted by AYUKA and is about 17 minutes long.
The summary is using and acquiring templates in Impress.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hello, this is AYUKA, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another in our exciting
series of tutorials on Libra Office, focusing for now on the presentation graphics program
called Impress.
Now last time we took a look at the mechanics of creating a presentation but it was a blank
presentation, white slides with black text.
I've been urging everyone to stay focused there but at some point you know you have to
start looking at some of the fancy stuff.
We're going to start getting into that and oddly enough it is going to involve things
like templates and styles.
I'm sure that comes as a great shock to you if you've been following my series.
Now, there are a couple of terms here that we want to take a look at template and master
page.
These are essentially the same thing.
But depending on where you're looking, one writer will call it a template, another
person will call it a master page.
Now inside the Impress application they call it master pages.
They're accessed on the right hand side of the page just like all of the other stuff
over there with properties on the sidebar.
If you as the author do not choose a specific template to use when creating a new presentation,
class will base the presentation on the default template that is built into Impress.
But you can create your own default template if you like.
Now remember the default template that I employ is the one that's called blank.
So clearly you can start with that and then shift to something else later.
So how does this work?
First let's say you've created your presentation.
You followed all the things that we've talked about so far.
You prepared, you outlined, you did a blank presentation.
You get your content right.
None of your slides have too much stuff on them.
So if you've done all of that, you've probably done a pretty decent job already.
What comes next?
We could take a blank presentation and what we could do is we could start just adding stuff.
You could go in and say well I want to have a background and you could choose a colored
background and put an ingredient and all of that.
Typically if you work in a large organization, for instance, I work in a company that is
global, that's to me that's a definition of large.
You know, they will probably have standards that say you should use a certain logo or
they may have a complete slide background.
What have you?
They may specify text colors and fonts and so on.
Templates are a way to contain all of these settings and the styles and all of the other
specifications.
So in that way it's very similar to what we saw with Writer where we said styles were
important but you couldn't use styles until you had a template to put them in.
Well the same thing in Impress.
Templates are a way to contain all of these things.
So if you know you're going to use the same setup over and over, it probably makes sense
to create a template that has all of that and maybe even make that the default template.
So all of these settings automatically get applied every time you begin a new presentation.
When your template has everything you want, you save it as a template by following the
instructions for saving templates, which I will get to in a second.
Then to make it the default, go to File Templates Manage, which will open up a similar window.
Go to My Templates, click on the template you just created, then click the Set as Default
button to make it the new default template.
Now like in Writer, MasterPages in Impress can contain their own styles, which is very
useful.
For example, the design of the slides may make it desirable that text be a certain color
within the MasterPage and having it contain its own styles helps with this.
Clearly you would not want to, although I have seen people do this, have a gray background
with gray text.
And even if there are different values of gray, that is still an incredibly stupid thing
to do.
I actually saw that once at an educational conference and it was done by someone who was actually
attempting to teach people how to do good presentations.
It's just the most amazing thing in the world.
So clearly if you have a dark background, you want light text.
Now that could mean dark blue with a pale yellow or something like that, which around
here is very popular because blue and yellow are the colors of the University of Michigan.
But that's an example what you want to do.
If you are going to be presenting a presentation in a room that is kind of dark, that might
work very well.
That's typically what you see on a lot of television things.
They will do things with dark backgrounds and light colored text.
In a well lit room, I would probably go with something with a light background and dark
text.
But you can experiment and see how you want to do it.
Now in addition to the question about creating a template, what most people want to do
is they want to find templates.
And there are lots of templates available online.
So what are some of the places you can go?
Well, LibraOffice.org has a place called the Template Center.
You can go there and get templates.
And a link to the Template Center is in the show notes for the show.
So you'll be able to get that.
There is something called Presentation Magazine, which by the way, I think I've mentioned
before, it might be something you want to subscribe to.
It's a free email newsletter.
And they have a page of free, what they call free open office templates.
And as we've said before, open office and LibraOffice are very similar.
I even note that Bruce Biefield, who is one of my gurus on all of this, is starting
to think that there's movement towards re-merging those since a patchy open office
does seem to be somewhat languishing.
There's other, I've got a link to a few other places here, CHTSAI.org, there's one that
has templates free, there's a place called freepowerpointtemplates.com that also has a page
for free open office and LibraOffice templates.
And all of these, the links are all in the show notes for all of this.
So there's plenty more out there.
If you just open up your browser and do a search for Impressed Templates or Impressed
Backgrounds in the search engine of your choice, you'll probably find a ton.
I like to find ones I can use, and then I add them to my collection.
So how do you add them?
Well, there's two ways you can add templates in any LibraOffice application.
And we discussed this previously in regard to Calc templates, and I'll refer you to Libra
Office Calc, the object model in using templates, which was a previous tutorial.
So you can go back and review that.
Since that covered the topic in some detail, I won't repeat all of it here, but I will
give a brief explanation of what is involved.
Now in general, templates are either packaged as standalone template files or as extensions.
For extensions, you go to Tools, Extension Manager, and click Add.
For standalone template files, open the template manager by going to File, New, Templates.
Open your My Templates folder if it's not already open, then look for the Import button.
This opens a standard file manager window.
Go to where your downloaded template file is, select it, and click Open.
Now note that a template should be a file with the extension dot OTP.
That's the proper extension for an impressed template.
But as we discussed previously, templates, master pages, and slide backgrounds are often
lumped together in people's minds as templates.
You will encounter this.
What typically people will do is they'll just give a empty presentation that has all of
this, and they'll call it a template and say, hey, here you go, template.
Now if that's the case, then instead of being an OTP, T as in Thomas, it will be an ODPD
as in David.
Now that is a file that is a presentation itself.
There's a little bug there that I'm going to have to deal with, so I'm going to talk
about that.
This is why I put off saving templates until the end.
The reason is there is an odd bug in impressed that might bite you in trying to save a template.
The problem is that the My Templates folder for impress does not appear at all in the
template manager for some versions of impress.
I've had some very interesting discussions with people, developers, and people on the user's
mailing list about all of this.
I think in the most current versions, this is fixed.
But it does make it very difficult to save a template.
So my number one advice would be make sure you're running the latest version.
That seems to get around that.
But if you, for whatever reason, you've got an older version, there's kind of a Clujie
workaround.
That's this.
Go to File, Save as Template on the main menu bar to open the Template Manager dialog.
By default, the Template Manager opens at the Documents page.
Double-click on the Media Wiki folder to select it and activate the Save icon, then click
the Save icon.
Specify the template name in the pop-up dialog and click Accept.
The template is now saved into the Media Wiki folder.
This appears in the Media Wiki folder on the dialog page of the file type being saved,
which is presentations, and close the Template Manager dialog.
Then go to File, New Templates on the main menu bar to open the Template Manager dialog.
Again, and that seems awkward.
Closing and opening the Template Manager is necessary so that we can complete the steps
of this Clujie workaround, which is about moving your template to the My Templates folder.
So select the presentations tab to open the dialog for presentations.
Double-click the Media Wiki folder to open it.
Select the Template you've just added and the file handling controls are displayed.
Click the Move to Folder icon and select the My Templates from the drop list that appears.
Your template will be moved from the Media Wiki folder to the My Templates folder and
close the Template Manager dialog.
Now I'm going to thank Brian Barker from the Libra Office Users List, who by the way
is a very smart fellow.
So if you ever subscribed to the list, pay attention to anything he says.
He's the one who gave me that particular approach to solving the problem.
Now in the newest versions that shouldn't be a problem, you should be able to just go
to File, New Templates, go to Impress, and go to the My Templates, and just Save, and
that should be the end of the problem.
If you've created one of your own by just opening a blank presentation and adding graphics
colors, blah, blah, blah, blah, or if you have downloaded one that is a presentation
file and not a template file, and you want to use it either way, that saving is how
you do that.
Now, when you select Master Pages in the sidebar, you'll see the ones available to you
right next to the sidebar.
At the start, these will be the ones that come with Libra Office out of the box.
But as we saw above, you can add your selection, multiple ones, if you wish, by saving templates,
including ones you downloaded from online sites.
To apply one to a presentation, just click on it.
That's all is involved.
So if you created a blank presentation, and you say, now I want to put in my page template,
that's about how hard it is.
You just go to Master Pages, click on the one you want.
Now, if you later want to change the one that was used, you might find that selecting
a different one only applies to the slide you have selected.
The easiest way to fix that is to go to the slide's sorter, press Ctrl A to select
all, then click on the Master Page you want to use.
This will apply the Master Page to all of the presentation.
Now, note also, you do not need to use only one master for an entire presentation.
But do use some common sense.
In a large presentation with two major sections, it might make sense to give each section
its own master.
But don't go overboard.
Remember, you want the attention to be on you, not on your slides.
Now, creating your own master pages, all right?
There can be a little bit more to this than just sticking in some graphics and colors.
So if you really want to do a good job, go to View Master Slide Master to bring up the
Master View, and you'll bring up a small floating toolbar called the Master View Toolbar.
The first button on the left with a plus sign that you create a new Master Page, but you
may not need to do anything because when you open the Master View, it usually gives you
a brand new one to work with.
You have a number of options here, including text options.
Now there is a screenshot on my website, link is in the show notes.
And if you open it up, you should be able to see this in Libra Office yourself.
I have my styles and formatting window docked, as we've talked about many, many times.
And so, taking a look at that, you can see that it's going to start opening that with
all of the styles.
And what this is telling you is that many of the elements of the Master Page can be controlled
by styles.
So we should expect that.
However, this particular tutorial is not about styles.
This particular tutorial is about the Master Page.
So in order to keep this from getting any longer than it already is, I'm going to put off
a discussion of styles until the next tutorial may be take several, actually.
Then I'll bring the pieces together to create a template with the Master Page and the
group of styles and pull it all together.
I've done that with Writer and with Calc, so that shouldn't be terribly surprising.
So this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off and reminding you as always to support
free software.
Bye-bye.
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