OpenOffice Impress Issue: Applying Formatting to the Wrong Master Page

I posted about the disappearing master page Wednesday. Today I'll talk about the wackiness surrounding creating two new master pages at once.

Now, this isn't that big an issue. Basically, the rule is, just create one new master page at a time. Create it, apply it, save the presentation, maybe go get a cup of coffee or eat lunch. Then if you need to, go ahead and create another new master page from scratch in that same presentation or template.

Why?

Because when you've got two or more new master pages being created at once, some of the formatting, especially the bullets, of the second one you create will be applied to the first one.

Yep.

Let's say you're here under View > Master > Slide Master happily editing away. You've created one and formatted it, then you immediately create another one.

There's the new blank master page

You choose Format > Page, Background tab and choose a nice background for the master page.

So far so good.

Now you get crazy and apply pretty new green bullets to the 2nd master page.

But -- hey, the new bullet formatting didn't take effect. Not on this slide, at least.

That's because the new bullets got applied to the first master page. Somehow Impress thinks you're still working on that one, likely because it hasn't been applied to any slides.

Dangit.

So: Whenever you create a master page, choose View > Normal, apply the new master page to at least one slide, and save. Then you can go back and create another new master page. This still doesn't work perfectly -- the bullet formatting, when I tried it, didn't show up in the second master page. However, it didn't get applied to the wrong master page, and it did show up when I applied the 2nd new master page to a slide.

Again, as mentioned in the previous post, save everything as a template.

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Comments

[Guopeng]

I've been fighting in vain with multiple OpenOffice Impress master page the last night, searching through all kinds of helpless documents. All I want is separate master pages for title slides and content slides. Your article really saved my day! Thank you very much! ... and thanks Google for indexing your page :)

[lussy]

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