hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1915.txt

Episode: 1915
Title: HPR1915: 67 - LibreOffice Impress - Tables
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1915/hpr1915.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 11:05:25

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This is HPR episode 1915 entitled 67 Libra Office Impress Tables and in part of the series, Libra Office,
it is hosted by AYUKA and in about 16 minutes long, the summer is,
Impress Tables and how to format them.
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Hello, this is AYUKA. Welcome to you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our ongoing series on Libra Office Impress and today I want to talk about tables.
Now we have already looked at three of the four objects that are offered to you on a new slide,
charts, pictures and movies, so it's kind of time to take a look at tables.
Now you do have some options here, you can embed a table from Calc or writer
and there may be times where that makes sense, particularly if you have a reason to do object linking
or embedding or the data is already there in the form you need it, but most of the time you
can do what you need to do inside of Impress using its own functionality.
Now as we saw last time with charts, you can just click the button in the middle of a new slide and
insert a table that way, but as we also saw with chart there are some limitations there.
All right, if you insert a table you lose the auto layout text box, if you put in some text you
lose the button to insert the table, so again the alternative, you go to the insert menu and select
table and whichever way you do it, a window is going to pop up, it's going to ask you to specify
the number of rows and columns. Now you can adjust this later, but it's a little more work,
so if you already know how many rows and columns you're going to need and that's not really
rocket science to figure that one out, is it fill it in now, save yourself some trouble.
Now this will insert a default table into your slide with the number of rows and columns you
specified, but if you look at the sidebar on the right you'll see that the properties window has
opened the table design section for you. That looks interesting. Now there's two sections to that
table design, there are basically kind of templates that you can see that have different colors
and then under that a series of check boxes, so let's take a look at these check boxes for a moment.
First one, header row, and that usually is one of the two that's going to be checked by default
when you create a new table. So when that is checked the very first row has a different background
from the rest of the table. Usually that means a darker color, but it's just something that's
going to set it apart. Then total row, that's similar to header row, but instead of the first row,
it's the last row. So now if your table had numerical data with totals at the bottom checking
that might be useful, it would help emphasize the totals row a little bit. Banded rows.
Now this is like that old green and white computer paper. I'm assuming I'm not the only one old
enough to remember that. It alternates the background from one row to the next to make it easier to
read. First column makes the background darker on the first column. Last column makes the
background darker on the last column. Then banded columns, like with banded rows, makes the columns
alternate the background. Now you would never use all six of these together. That would be a hideous
monstrosity, but I could imagine for instance selecting a design I like, so for instance I can
take a look at these and the fourth one on the top turns out as turquoise. Select that,
very nice color, and then say header row, banded rows, and first column. Now why would I do that?
Well, the header row is the header, and for a lot of tables that first column is going to be row
labels of some kind that is going to make the data easier to understand or description or something.
So it can make sense to have both of those, and then of course banded rows just makes it easier to read.
Now once you have put it in there, if you select the table, and remember when we talk select,
what we mean is you double-click on it and then what you should see, and sometimes I've got to kind
of click around to get this to work. I get a border around it and the eight handles. That means
it's selected. Now at that point the table toolbar should open for you. On my system it docked at
the bottom next to the drawing toolbar, but you can also click and drag it to the top or a side,
or you could even have it as a floating toolbar if that's what you like. Now you can do a lot from
this toolbar, so let's take a look at it. Remember that you can always read the name of the button
by mousing over it and reading the pop-up. The buttons are table. This lets you create a table on
the current slide. If you click the button, you get the same dialog we already saw for choosing
columns and rows, or you can click the drop-down on the right to get a graphical chooser that will
draw the rows and columns if that's how you like to do it. And you may be thinking, wait a minute,
I thought I had to select the table to make this toolbar pop-up. When you select the table,
it will pop up, but you could just have it open anyway by going to view toolbars and selecting it.
So it's not useless. Line style. That button controls the borders between cells and let you
select the style you want, like a solid line dotted dashed and so on. And then line color,
again, for the borders of cells, what color is that line going to be?
And then borders. This lets you choose where you want the borders to go on cells.
Now, mostly in tables, we tend to see a full grid where the cells are bordered on all four sides,
but you can choose to say just on one or both sides or just the top or just the bottom or, you know,
you've probably seen these things before. See a lot of options. Then area style slash filling.
That's two drop downs that are part of this. The first drop down lets you select from color,
gradient, hatching, or bitmap. So you make a selection there. Then the second one lets you choose
from the options available depending on what you chose the first time. So for instance,
if I choose color and the first drop down, the second one will show all of the different colors I
can select. Now, why would that be interesting? Well, let's say I've got a color that has been
applied to my table as a whole, but I want to emphasize one particular cell. Select the cell,
use these area style filling drop downs to give it a different background that's going to make it stand out.
Merge cells. As you might expect, let you merge two cells into one. So you just select the two cells.
Clicking and dragging is usually the most efficient way to do that that I have found.
Then there's split cells that let you split a cell into two or more cells.
You have the option of splitting horizontally or vertically, but it is worded in a very confusing
manner. When they say horizontal or vertical, what they're saying is, where do you want us to draw
the divider? So if you selected horizontal, it would draw a horizontal line through the middle of
the cell to divide it. Or if you had it in three, it would draw two lines, whatever.
And then that would split it into the cells stacked on top of each other. And you say,
wait, man, I selected a horizontal. Yeah, I know. It's just maybe this makes perfect sense to
everyone else in the world. To me, it seems very counterintuitive. It is what it is. So,
now you know what to look for there. Then optimize. Now this is an interesting one.
And I think it's worth getting to understand a little bit. This evenly distributes
the selected cells. And it can be horizontal or vertical, as the case may be.
And to see what we're talking about here, let's start with a cell that has more data that can be
displayed. Now the cell will display part of it. But to see everything, you would need to make
the cell bigger. This button will do that. But it will also make the rest of the cells you select
expand equally to the one that needs to be expanded. So you select a group of cells, you click
optimize. And what's going to happen is it'll expand enough to display everything, but it'll expand
all of those cells equally. Now, if you only select cells in a couple of rows or columns,
only those will be changed. If you select the entire table, all of the cells of the table will
change by the same amount, which I think results in a better display in most cases. Also note,
this goes the other direction. It will reduce cell sizes if the cells are larger than they need
to be to display all of your data. Now, as a rule, I use the optimize button only when I first
selected the entire table. Because I think the result is a lot better when all of the cells are
the same size and it's symmetrical. To me, tables just look weird when I've got different row heights
or different column widths all over the place. You know, your call, but the optimize button will
help you to get everything even. Then we've got three buttons, top, center, and bottom. And here
they're talking about where the data is in the vertical thing of the cell. So is it the top of
the cell centered in the cell or on the bottom of the cell? Then four buttons, insert row, insert
column, delete row, delete column. I like to think these buttons are self-explanatory.
Then there's a button called table design. It doesn't do a damn thing. All right, the reason is
the table design feature was moved to the sidebar. It's the thing we started talking about when we
started talking about tables. And because it's there, it doesn't need to be on the table toolbar anymore.
It probably will be removed in a future release. Then finally, table properties.
This opens a window where you can choose the font, the font effects, the borders, and the background.
Now, this affects the entire table, but the assumption here is that you want all the cells to be
the same. You know, if you wanted to do something with individual cells, you could, for instance,
change the background using what we talked about previously, the area style filling,
selecting cells and using those. You want to change the font. We'll talk about that in a moment.
So the table properties, though, is for the whole table.
Now, there's three buttons you cannot see on the toolbar, but you can reach them.
And you reach them by right-clicking on a blank space on the toolbar. And in the pop-up,
select visible buttons. In that list, you'll see all of the buttons we've already mentioned,
plus three buttons you did not see. Now, you can add any or all of them from here by clicking
on the button to add it to the toolbar. They are select table. And this lets you select the entire
table with the border and eight handles. And it's a lot easier than clicking on the slide until you
get it. I recommend adding it. Then the others are a little more optional. There's two of them.
Select column and select row. With your cursor in a cell, clicking on one of these buttons will
select the entire row or column. Probably handy, but if you find too many buttons confusing,
these are ones you can get along without. Clicking and dragging, I find, is a very quick way to
select a row or a column. It's just not that hard. Now, note that you can also remove a button
by going to that visible buttons thing and clicking on a button you don't need. For example,
the table design button is useless. So remove it. You don't need to take up space with that.
Now, as we saw previously, the assumption in press makes in your table when you select table
properties is that all cells will be formatted identically and have the same properties.
But suppose you want to make some cells different. Two cases that are similar come to mind.
Frequently, the first row of a table is a header row, which is different. And the first column is
frequently a description, which is a, frequently a little bit different as well. What if you wanted
them to have, for instance, different fonts or alignment or what have you? A good example,
when I do tables, I like to make my headers bolder and I usually will center them even if the rest
of my table is flush left and standard weight. Well, to change the font or font weight for a header row,
I could select the row either by clicking and dragging or by using the select row button.
Then I can right-click and in the pop-up menu, I can select character and then change the font,
make it bigger, make it bold, add font effects like underlining and so on.
Then I can right-click again, but this time select paragraph and on the third tab make the row centered.
So in this way, I can make individual changes to any cells or groups of cells within the table.
And so with that, we've now completed our look at all of those four objects that the
default slide tells you you can put in and we've seen how to put them in and what to do with them.
So we're actually fairly close to wrapping up our look at the impress, but I think for next time,
what I'm going to do is something we haven't talked about yet is animations and that's also going
to be a little bit of fun. And so with that, this is Huka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off
and reminding you, as always, to support FreeSoftware. Bye-bye.
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