OpenOffice Impress Master Pages: The Disappearing Act

Impress is....well, it's not always as solid as the other OpenOffice.org applications. However, there are ways to deal with it.

I'm going to post about two particular Impress issues: the disappearing master page, today, and on Friday, the wackiness surrounding creating two new master pages at once.

Master pages are the backgrounds for your presentations. A template or presentation might have one or more master pages in it.

All right. So you want to create a new master page. Go ahead, but you need to care for it very very carefully. Here's the short version. Create a new master page under View > Master > Slide Master by right-clicking in the lefthand pane, creating a new master page, and designing it. Then choose View > Normal to go  back. Now, you MUST apply that new master page to at LEAST one slide, or your wonderful new master page will go Poof. (Not always, but enough for it to be a big issue.) Also, choose File > Templates > Save and save whatever document you created the master page in.  Then the master page(s) in that presentation will be available in all future presentations you create or edit.

Now, here's the detail.

Just Creating a Master Page From Scratch

You're dying to create your own master page from scratch, to format presentations exactly the way you want. Here's how.

1.  Open or create your presentation or template.

2. Choose View > Master > Slide Master.

3. Now you're in the master page view.

4. Right-click in the left hand pane and choose to rename the default  new master page. Not required but it's nice when you have a lot of them later.

5. Give it a name and click OK.

6. It's renamed.

7. All right. Format your master page, go nuts. Choose Format > Page, Background tab to change the background color. Add graphics, right-click on each and choose Arrange > Send to Back to put them in the background behind the text. Whatever you want.

8. Choose View > Normal to go back to normal view.

9. You see your master page.

The Disappearing Act

10.  Now, what if you now think, hey, I like this thing I designed, but for the first few slides that I have here, I'm going to apply this other master page. You might do this by right-clicking on another master page over there in the right-hand pane, like the nice green one, and choosing Apply to All Slides.

11. Guess what. Your beautiful master page that you worked so hard on is gone. Yes, even if you saved the presentation.

How Do You Prevent the Disappearing Act?

You MUST apply that new master page to at LEAST one slide, and keep it applied. Or your wonderful new master page will go Poof. (Not always, but enough for it to be a big issue.) So even if you don't intend to apply your new master page to the first slide, keep it applied there until you apply it to other slides.

Also, as soon as you've created your master page, choose File > Templates > Save and save whatever document you created the master page in. 

Then the master page(s) in that presentation will be available in all future presentations you create or edit.

---

Comments

[achu]

hello

first up nice blog.

been using impress for some time now and there are two major problems i have been facing.

1.) When we import images into the master template, it shows correctly in the slide view, but when we do Slide Show the image shrinks and becomes very small.

2.) When we add hyperlinks 2 out of 4 times the machine hangs in Slide Show mode.

If you know anything about these two issues I will be obliged if you can post on the same.

[achu]

hello

first up nice blog.

been using impress for some time now and there are two major problems i have been facing.

1.) When we import images into the master template, it shows correctly in the slide view, but when we do Slide Show the image shrinks and becomes very small.

2.) When we add hyperlinks 2 out of 4 times the machine hangs in Slide Show mode.

If you know anything about these two issues I will be obliged if you can post on the same.

[Adrian Thurston]

I Keep getting burned by the disappearing act. It's a cruel punishment. Arrrrg. At least I'm glad to know that I'm not crazy and this is happening to other people.

[slideshowboy]

Hi!

A comment on the background image, because you can actually set the background instead of using a normal image exported to the back. By choosing Format -> Page -> Background you can choose to use Bitmap and select the image you want. If you don't want to use the crappy defaults, you can import your own images into the library by choosing Format -> Area -> Background.

[pedro]

Great! thanks a lot!

[holger]

Hi,

nice blog.

Is there a tracker issue for the problem of the disappearing new master page?

[Solveig]

Hi Holger,

I'm not sure if there's a tracker issue....at some point I should go in there and blog about things I think are important, post the links to let people vote.

Solveig

[ast]

Hi Solveig,

Ran across this page when trying to solve a mystery with disappearing footer text from some slides I recently added. Not sure why it stopped appearing, but it suddenly did on both 2.4 under Ubuntu "Hardy" and the official Sun release under WinXP.

Anyway, I unpacked the Impress document bundle to see what was happening in the XML, and for some reason, the reference to the footer text just wasn't showing up in the new slides. The attribute was missing from the page element.

After getting very frustrated with it, I decided that I'd try and experiment with re-applying the master (which didn't work). One of the other things I noticed was that the ODF elements treat whitespace as significant, so when I re-packed the document, I lost my spacing. Having nothing to lose, I fixed the spacing for the footer (why isn't there a menu item that says "footer" if there's one for the rest of the master element items???) in the dialog and hit "apply to all".

Magically, it fixed the rest of the slides, and now when I add a new slide, all of the elements are there. I'm glad I found something that worked.

I thought I'd add this note here in case anyone else runs across your page looking for disappearing master elements like I did. One more tip for you to put into your course/book I guess.

It's really a shame that Impress is so flaky, because I generally like the features, and I think it's one of the best parts of the OO suite (after Draw, of course). It's also the one piece of the suite that really was ahead of Microsoft in terms of functionality until the latest version of PowerPoint.

Here's hoping (likely in vain) that the stability improves dramatically between now and 2.5.

All the best,

ast

[Solveig]

Hi ast,

Wow! You've done a lot of work on this. I've actually found that the disappearing act doesn't happen anymore in the way I described in the post. I did find some weirdness with the page numbers in 2.4.

Solveig

[Sharon Avigdor]

Excellent Post. I was struggling on how to do it and your post saved me lots of time.

[TheDP]

Hi to everyone!
Nice blog and really useful hints. But I noticed that pressing CTRL-Z to undo the master application to the slides does just raise the custom-made master from the limbo of temporary files...

[Sovleig]

Excellent! Do try that, do ctrl z a few times if necessary to resurrect the MP.

[wow]

http://www.batterygoshop.co.uk/batterycharger/delta/delta-19v-3.16a-60w.htm Delta Electronics 19V 3.16A Laptop AC Adapter ADP-60CB ,

[bentree]

ok whats with the post from wow?
PS Great I'm not loosing it. They really are disappearing.

[Microsoft Training]

its creating problem but i will try it again too.

[wow power leveling]

http://www.gamegoldme.com/
http://www.wowgold-powerleveling.com/
http://www.wowgold-wow.com/
http://www.wowpowerleveling.me
http://www.watchrolexshop.com
http://www.wowgold-wow.com/wow-power-leveling
http://rs-runescapegold.com/
http://www.watchrolexshop.com/wow-power-leveling/
http://www.cheap-lotrogold.com/
http://www.globalsale.me/Aion-gold-083.aspx
http://www.cheap-gamegold.org
http://www.gamegoldvip.org
http://www.globalsale.me/