How to create slide titles

[jwriter]

hi, this is a short version of a previous post. Does anybody know how to
1) create titles for new slides?
2) edit the titles of existing slides?
Please note - the titles should also show up properly in outline mode.

[acknak]

Have you read the Forum Survival Guide? Please don't post the same question in multiple places. Since your first post has no responses, let's just continue here.

I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand how you can have a problem with putting titles on a slide: you just click and type. All the slide layouts (right-hand panel) have a slot for a title, except the empty layout.

The slide titles will automatically appear in the outline view.

The slide names that appear under each slide in the left-hand panel are not titles, they are slide names--an internal label that is not connected with the slide content at all (as far as I know).

As far as importing a Powerpoint File, the one I checked appears to have the slide names set from the titles, but the name is just a copy of the title--there's no direct editing connection. I can edit the slide titles just by clicking on them.

If you're having trouble editing the titles for a specific PPT file, maybe you can attach the file here, or use a file sharing site (e.g. mediafire.com) if the file is bigger than the 128k limit. You can trim it down to one or two slides if that still shows the problem.

[jwriter]

Have you read the Forum Survival Guide? Please don't post the same question in multiple places.

Apologies - I thought my original question was too complicated as nobody was responding. I thought I would try to simplify it - no offense intended.

I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand how you can have a problem with putting titles on a slide: you just click and type. All the slide layouts (right-hand panel) have a slot for a title, except the empty layout.

Just so I understand, do you mean click on one of the slide layouts on the right-hand panel? Let's say I want to add a title to a an existing slide that has no title - what then? Do I understand that I would just create a text box with the T tool? Sorry, I'm a newbie here and just trying to understand.

The slide titles will automatically appear in the outline view.

If I'm not mistaken, a text box is not a title until you attach the "Title" style to it. Is that correct? This is huge problem with the OO manual. There is no clarification of how to make the content in Normal view appear in the Outline view. I think the styles are the key and this really needs to be in the manual (maybe Chapter 1, page 4).

The slide names that appear under each slide in the left-hand panel are not titles, they are slide names

OK, now I understand, thanks for pointing that out. I think I understand now how to add titles and make the Normal text appear in the Outline view (styles appear to be the key). Once I understand that, then I don't care if the PowerPoint came over correctly - at least I can fix it. Thanks for the support.

[acknak]

Well, I think at this point, you understand it about as well as I do

All I've ever done is to use impress for simple presentations, and play around with it until I figure out how to do what I want, which you appear to be comfortable doing as well. Frankly, I think Impress suffers from a schizophrenic design that started out quite different from Powerpoint, but then was drastically modified to "act more like Powerpoint", and there are a lot of things about it that feel very confused and awkward.

Case in point: the layouts. Layouts provide some standard slots for items on the page. You can type in a title in one layout, then switch the slide over to a different layout and content on the page will shift to follow the new layout. Part of that is the style that is applied to the slide content--you can watch the styles change as you change the layout.

But you can also just make your own items using the text boxes from the Drawing toolbar, and apply the same styles to them. They will have some properties of the layout items, but not all. It seems that the layout items and the user-created items are similar but different kinds of object.

Suffice it to say that Impress is a weird program in the details. I'm not sure anyone really knows how it's supposed to work.

There is a nice user guide online here: Impress Guide; a PDF version is available also.

[jwriter]

Thanks for the heads up on the quirkiness. I'm sure I'll be hanging around these parts in the future.