OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas: A Useful Hack for Storing Text or Editable Pictures You Need to Reuse, in OpenOffice Impress Presentations

July 02, 2007

A Useful Hack for Storing Text or Editable Pictures You Need to Reuse, in OpenOffice Impress Presentations

My friend Ben Horst wrote to me with a question about how to store editable content in a presentation that you reuse periodically. Like a few buttons formatted a particular way, text boxes, anything that can't easily be drawn and formatted and has to look a certain way.

My answer was, well, kind of a hack, but I think it's useful enough to point out.

What Doesn't Work, But Is Useful For Other Things

In Writer, you've got Autotext, a very nice way to store text or graphics that you need to reuse. (Create the text or graphics you need, choose Edit > AutoText, hold down the button with the arrow and choose New. Also name it and create a shortcut. Then click OK. Type the shortcut followed by F3 to insert the text in any document on that computer.)

But not in Impress.

Throughout the application, you have the Gallery where you can store gifs, jpgs, etc. But this isn't any good for storing, for instance, text boxes.

The Hack I Came Up With
If you've got editable things you would like to conveniently access in a presentation, just store them in either the Handouts view or the Notes view.

Click the Handouts tab at the top of the work area, and just add whatever you need. This of course assumes you don't need to give handouts of this presentation. In this illustration there's a text box and a smiley face shape.