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Episode: 1805
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Title: HPR1805: 56 - LibreOffice Impress - Styles and Objects 1 - Presentation Styles
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1805/hpr1805.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:28:05
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---
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This is HBR Episode 1885 entitled 56 Libra Office Impress,
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Tile and Objects 1 Preventation Tile and in part of the series, Libra Office,
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it is hosted by AYUKA and in about 15 minutes long.
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The summary is Preventation Tile and Abuse in Libra Office Impress.
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This episode of HBR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com.
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Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
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That's HBR15.
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Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
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Hello, this is AYUKA, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode.
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In our ongoing series on Libra Office, taking a look at the Presentation Graphics Program
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Impress.
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This time we talked about templates or as they're called in impressed master pages.
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Basically the same thing, but with just two different pieces of terminology.
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Now, as we saw with Writer and with Calc, styles are very important and I always make
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it a point to start with templates because styles live inside of templates.
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It's really annoying as I'll get out if you spend a lot of time developing styles that
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you like and then they seem to disappear on you.
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So I always start with the templates because styles live inside of templates, so what you
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need to do is you need to have a template and then create the styles there and save it
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in the template and then you can apply it.
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So anytime you change a style, you need to make sure it's saved inside of a template
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if you ever want to use it again.
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If you wanted it to be generally available in all the documents or spreadsheets, then you
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want to make sure it's part of the default template.
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So you know, this is standard stuff whether we're talking Writer, Calc or Impress.
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But there is an additional wrinkle here with the master pages.
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So how are styles stored when we're looking at Impress?
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If you modify a style in a presentation, it stays in the presentation but not anywhere
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else.
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If you then create a new presentation, your modifications will not be there.
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If you edit a master page and modify a style there and save it, the modification remains
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in that master page and will show up in a presentation based on that master page from
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now on.
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And if you want one or more slides in a presentation to have different styles from the rest, you
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need to create master pages for the different styles and apply them to those particular slides.
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Remember that a presentation can use more than one master page.
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Now Impress has two kinds of styles, drawing object styles and presentation styles.
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Because Impress is fundamentally a graphical program, at least in part, this does kind
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of make sense.
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So a discussion of styles needs to address both of them.
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This particular tutorial, I'm going to do the presentation styles, which is a little
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bit closer to what you're used to from previous discussions of Writer and Calc.
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Now the styles and formatting window we're used to is here in Impress.
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But remember that in recent versions, it's starting to move over to the right hand side
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instead of the left hand side.
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It doesn't matter where it's docked and you can move it around.
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But the appearance is standard.
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So the styles and formatting, you're going to have a typical kind of window that's just
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going to list all of the styles available to you.
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Now in this particular case, we have two icons.
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We have two icons because we have two different kinds of styles.
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Now in Writer, for instance, we had five icons because we were talking about paragraph styles
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and character styles and page styles and list styles and frame styles and you know, every
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one of those had its own.
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Here we've got drawing styles and presentation styles.
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So take a look at the styles and formatting window.
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First button is drawing object styles and the second is for presentation styles.
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But when you look at the options for drawing objects, you see what looks like text styles
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there.
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Why is that?
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Well the answer is that they apply to different objects.
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Impress uses the object model heavily, which we will get into.
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Note that presentations styles control the text entered into auto layout text boxes, slide
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master backgrounds and background objects.
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And drawing object styles control text entered into a text box or a graphic object.
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Understanding the object model is important here.
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Auto layout text boxes are the ones that come already added to the various slide types
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when you add a slide.
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There is usually a slide title box on top of the slide and generally a box for bullet
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points underneath the slide.
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As these are used most often, the presentation styles are used most often in your slides.
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However, you can also create a text box using the two text tools on the drawing toolbar.
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The horizontal text tool looks like a capital T and the vertical text tool looks like
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a capital T turned on its side.
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If you want to use styles to control the text in these boxes, you need to use the styles
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located in the drawing object section.
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Now all of this leads to an interesting thing.
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A text box is very different from an auto layout box.
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And that's worth knowing because if, let's say you're working on a slide and somehow in
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the course of what you're doing, you've managed to delete the auto layout box.
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And you think, no problem, I'll just draw a little text box in here.
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I would never do that because it just introduces a whole new way to go wrong.
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What I would do at that point is if I've deleted the auto layout box, start a new slide
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and get all my auto layout stuff in there.
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In the long run, you'll be happier if you do it that way.
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There's a place to use these drawing objects, but let's bear in mind that for most presentations,
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we can keep it pretty simple.
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Now presentation styles are fairly equivalent to the paragraph styles in writer.
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And the outline styles are linked.
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So a change in outline one will cascade through the other linked styles.
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Also, there are limitations to what you can do with styles in impress.
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They're not quite the same as in writer where you can create styles to your heart's content all day long.
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In impress, the styles are fixed.
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You cannot add a style to what is there.
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If you right click in the styles and formatting window, the pop up you get only has two selections,
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modify and hide.
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So you have a title style, a subtitle style, a background objects style,
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a background style, a notes style, and a set of linked outline styles.
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You cannot add to the list in any way.
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What you can do is to make each style fit your needs.
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And by creating different master pages or to use another term templates,
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you can have styles that are customized to each use.
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For example, as we discussed previously, if you have a darker colored background,
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you will probably want to use a font that is lighter colored,
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and with a light colored background, a font that is darker colored.
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So how do you modify a style?
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Pretty much the same as with all of the other applications.
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You right click on the style in the styles and formatting window and select modify.
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You will get a window that pops up,
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which should look fairly familiar since it is similar to the style windows we have seen for writer and calc.
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Now, this one has 14 tabs, so there's a lot you can customize here.
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What may be a little confusing at first is that these tabs do not only let you format the usual text things,
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they also seem to address certain graphics options.
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But that is the nature of impress.
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It is inherently a medium that encompasses both text and graphics.
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So what are these tabs?
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The first one is text.
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This applies to how text is displayed in text objects.
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You can set the space or margin between the text and the border,
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where it is located within the box and so on.
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Bullets.
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This is the same as in writer and let you select the type of bullets you want to use for bullet lists.
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This is something that you should look at in the outline styles,
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since it's outline styles that control all of the bullet lists.
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Numbering type.
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Again, similar to what you have in writer and let you select the type of numbering and how they are formatted.
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Image.
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This is for bullets and let you use images instead of font characters for your bullet lists.
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In writer, this was a little harder to get to, although the option was there.
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Here, it's much easier.
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Customize.
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This is for the outline styles and let you control them as a linked group,
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setting the amount of indent at each level and so on.
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Now, we got into this enormous detail in Libra Office writer.
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So I would suggest if this is something important to you,
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you go back and review the stuff in writer and see how you can apply some of it here as well.
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Alignment.
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Pretty standard text alignment options.
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Left, right, center, justified, and so on.
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Tabs.
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The standard option for setting tabs and works just like in writer.
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Line.
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This is a graphics option.
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It lets you select whether a line will be a continuous solid line, a dashed line,
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a dotted line, and so on.
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It also lets you select color.
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Other options are great out here, like arrow styles, since those apply to purely graphical objects.
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Area.
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That's the same as what we saw with presentation styles.
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You know, this lets you specify how you will fill an area using a solid color, gradient,
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hatching, or a bitmap image.
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Each of these, when selected, opens up more controls.
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If you select color, you get a color picker, gradient gives you a number of options to
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select from and so on.
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The limitation here is that you must select from the available options impress as provided.
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If that is not good enough, you probably need to use a manual option instead of a style.
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Remember that you can add manual elements to a master page and have them automatically
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applied to your presentation.
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Shadow.
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This lets you add a shadow, which for a presentation style mostly means adding one to a line or
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a background object.
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You can select the position of the shadow, the amount of offset, color, and transparency.
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Transparency lets you add transparency to an area.
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You can control the amount of transparency as a percentage, use a gradient, and for
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gradients you have further controls to make it linear, radial, ellipsoid, and more.
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Fonts.
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Now these are the standard font options you're used to in Writer, so you can choose the
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font family, the style, like bold italic and so on, the size, all of that.
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Font effects.
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Just like in Writer, but this is where you choose the font color.
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In Impress, this becomes a big deal, whereas in Writer it is normally nothing you would
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be concerned about.
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Finally, indents and spacing.
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The same as in Writer, this is probably something you won't need to use much in Impress, however,
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since most of the supplies to paragraph options and who writes paragraphs in Impress.
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Now a note about using styles.
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In Writer, the use of styles is something we urged from the very beginning because it
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is the key to using that program effectively, particularly in long documents.
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But Impress, the situation is somewhat different.
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In the LibreOffice Impress documentation, they state.
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Unlike LibreOffice Writer, where it is recommended to use styles whenever possible, in Impress
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manual formatting has to be used more often.
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This is because presentation styles are fixed in Impress, therefore it is not possible,
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for example, to have two different level ones or different types of bullet points for
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the same outline level.
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Also the lack of support for character styles forces the use of manual formatting to modify
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sections of the text.
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Well, if that's what the people who created Impress say, I think it's worth bearing in mind.
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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, as Emerson said.
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So I don't go into it thinking that styles and templates have to be used identically in
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all.
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For instance, if you think about it in Writer, I emphasize it very heavily right from the
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get go because that's the key to Writer.
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I did it more as an add-on in Calc.
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It's useful, but let's face it, can you do good things in spreadsheets without styles and
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templates?
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Of course you can.
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So you know, apply these concepts as they make sense in each of these applications is kind
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of the way I want to look at it.
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So one way I think about it here is that Writer is a very mature product, Impress somewhat
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less mature.
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It may be that over time some of these limitations can be removed, but it does mean that we need
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to spend some time on learning the manual formatting options, which we will.
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But I want to make sure you understand styles and how to store them in a master page first.
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So that was presentation styles.
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The other one, drawing object styles, you might guess is going to be our next tutorial.
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But for now, this is Ahuka signing off for Hacker Public Radio and reminding you as always
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to support free software.
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Bye-bye.
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To find out how easy it really is, Hacker Public Radio was founded by the Digital Dove
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Pound and the Infonomicon Computer Club, and is part of the binary revolution at binwave.com.
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If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on
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the website or record a follow-up episode yourself, unless otherwise stated, today's show is released
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under Creative Commons, Attribution, ShareLite, 3.0 license.
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