hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1765.txt

Episode: 1765
Title: HPR1765: 53 - LibreOffice Impress - Outlining and Blank Presentations
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1765/hpr1765.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:01:46

---

This is HPR episode 1765 entitled 53 Libri Office Impress Outlining and Blang presentations,
and is part of the series Libri Office. It is hosted by Ahaka and is about 14 minutes long.
The summary is learning to start with the content and not the eye candy.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honest host.com.
Get 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 Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode in our
ongoing discussion of Libri Office focusing now on Impress the Presentation Graphics Program.
And I want to talk now about outlining and blank presentations. What's a good way to get started?
Now, if you'll recall from our first tutorial, we gave you the advice that you should start with
paper, not with the software, when preparing a presentation. Now, that should not be taken
too literally, since there is no particular magic to dead trees, but I think a little planning
ahead of time and in particular, the use of outlining can make for a more cohesive presentation.
The key is that you are focusing on the content and not on the eye candy.
Now, some years ago, I read an interesting article, which, as I recall, was in the chronicle of higher
education, about a study of students at a large university who were required to take the usual
freshman composition class. This altered place in the 1980s, so students would have had one of two
computers, the early Macintosh models, or DOS computers with Word Perfect, and each computer type
had its own sections of the class. When they looked at the achievement of the students, they found
something very puzzling. Students in sections using Macintosh had lower levels of achievement than
students in the DOS sections. They investigated other factors and found that the students had much
the same previous grades in secondary school, similar grades in entrance exams,
and similar grades in other classes, yet the instructors consistently rated the DOS students
as better writers. How could this be explained? Well, the Macintosh computers were the first to
introduce fancy page layout options, fonts, graphics, and so on. In fact, this head start is why
to this day, so much of the graphic design and desktop publishing is done with Macs.
In contrast, the DOS computers running Word Perfect were just about the complete opposite.
They presented you with a blank screen, with a blinking cursor, and nothing else.
They did not offer any whizzy wig capabilities at all.
So what the researchers concluded is that the students in the DOS sections were not able to think
about anything other than their content, and consequently did a good job of it. While Mac
students were seduced by all of the formatting and graphics capabilities, and never got around
actually doing any good writing. The application of this concept to presentations is clear.
All too often, you are asked to begin making a presentation by making graphical choices,
such as the slide master, before you have written a word. I think this is exactly the wrong way
to go. What I advise is that you create the content first, and add all the eye candy at the end.
There are several ways to do this. Now, if you open Impress, you will see that the middle window,
the workspace has five tabs, Normal, Outline, Notes, Handout, and Slide Sorter.
The second tab of this group puts you in Outlining mode, and lets you create a presentation by
simply outlining. The icon at the beginning of the row represents a slide with a bar graph on it,
and always denotes a new slide. The line with the icon in it is the line for the slide title,
since this is the very first slide. The title you enter will actually be the title of the
presentation, so type that in and hit Enter. You will then be on the next slide, which you can tell
because of the icon appearing on the left. But if you actually wanted to add a subhead for your
first slide, you can do that by using the Demote button, which is an arrow pointed to the right,
or you can use the keyboard equivalent Alt plus Shift plus right arrow. The icon will go away,
and your cursor will shift slightly to the right. Type in your name, for instance, and hit Enter.
This will not create a new slide, because Enter will always duplicate whatever element you are on.
So this adds another line for the subhead, and you could type in an organization, a date, or any other
information. If you hit Enter again, you will only get another line of subhead for your title slide.
To get to another new slide, you need to use the Promote button, which is an arrow pointing to the
left, or as you might guess, the keyboard equivalent is Alt plus Shift plus left arrow.
When you do this, the icon for the new slide will appear on the left, and your cursor will
shift slightly to the left as well. On this line, put the heading for the slide.
Then hit Enter, and Demote the line. When you do this, you will see that it automatically starts
creating bullets, and each time you hit Enter, another line, and another bullet is created.
When you have all your bullet points created, hit Enter, then Promote to get another new slide.
And if you need sub-bullet points at any point, just use the Demote to get sub-points and promote
to get back to first level bullets. Continue this way, you can create an entire presentation as an outline.
Now one of the ways I have found useful is to begin by creating an outline and writer.
This is not difficult as long as you follow a simple rule. The rule is that you need to use heading
styles in writer in a consistent manner. Every heading one you create will be a slide,
headline, or topic. Heading two would be a bullet point, heading three sub-bullet points, and so on.
This has the advantage of letting you use the writer tools, which for some people is much easier.
When you have the outline complete, and in the form you want, just go to the File menu,
select Send, and then Outline to Presentation, and your outline will open as a presentation and impress.
I whipped up a very simple sample outline, and used it to create a very simple three-slide presentation,
and if you have links in the show notes if you want to download and take a look at how both of those
things look. Now this opens in Outline View and Impress, but if you switch to Normal View,
you can see that the slides were also created. Now one issue is that this only handles very simple
formatting. For instance, if you use numbered points instead of bullet points, Impress will convert
them to bullet points anyway, and you don't have an initial title slide created this way.
Now, advantages and disadvantages here, I think the biggest advantage to using one of these
outlining options is that it forces you to think about your content, which is where you want to be
in the beginning. There are disadvantages though, and it is worth mentioning a few of them.
One is that you don't get a sense of how much content you are trying to squeeze onto one slide.
When you are outlining, it is easy to lose sight of this. What you never want to do is create
something called a blivit, interesting term, which can be defined in polite society as 10 pounds of
stuff in a 5 pound bag. Also, you may want to be incorporating graphics or other objects,
and this is a lot easier when you are looking at actual slides. Fortunately, there is an option to do
this. That would be working with a blank presentation. Now, Impress comes with a wizard for creating
a presentation, and when you use it, it starts you off by asking about the eye candy, backgrounds,
colors, slide transitions. You don't need to worry about this right now. You can always add this
stuff at the end after you have created your content. Instead, don't use the wizard, and just use
the blank presentation. On my installation, I have checked the box that says never show wizard
when opening Impress. You can enable the wizard again later, under Tools, Options, Libra Office
General, New Document on the main menu bar, and then select Start with Wizard option if you later
change your mind. I just leave it off. Your slides will all be white, your text will be black,
and that is just fine for now. Your first slide will be a title slide for your presentation.
Enter the title, and then any subtitle in the space underneath. Typically, this might be your name,
an affiliation, or similar information. Then you get another slide by clicking the New Slide button,
which we talked about last time. Now, this slide will have two sections as well. At the top is a
section for the slide title, and underneath is the Content section. By default, it is set to create
bullet points, but you could add other content as necessary, such as a photo, a graph, a table,
even movies and sound. Be careful, you don't go overboard in adding things. If you're going to
talk about things like movies and sounds, you have to understand, you may not have the technology
to reproduce all of that stuff, if you're just working with a very simple projector.
If you have focused on getting your content correct, you should now have a very nice,
plain, boring, black and white presentation. So how do you go about adding a little more visual
interest? We'll start looking at that one next. So thank you. This is Huka for Hacker Public Radio,
signing off and reminding you as always to support free software. Bye-bye.
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio dot org.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday, Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast and click on our contributing,
to find out how easy it really is. Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital
dot pound and the infonomicum computer club, and it's part of the binary revolution at binrev.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on the website
or record a follow-up episode yourself. Unless otherwise status, today's show is released on
creative comments, attribution, share a light, free dot org license.