Second-level Bullet Style Changes

[bsfinkel]

I am creating an Impress file, and I have slides with two-levels of bullets. The first level is a dot, and the second level is a dash. I added a new slide, and the second-level bullet is now another round dot. Why did the second-level style change, and how do I change it back to a dash. OpenOffice 4.1.5 on Windows 7 Professional. Thanks.

[FJCC]

It seems like the text has jumped to the Outline 3 style somehow. Open the Styles and Formatting window by selecting the menu Format -> Styles and Formatting. At the top left there are two small icons. Click the second from the left to display the Presentation styles. Make sure the list at the bottom of the window says All Styles. Click within the text of your first level text and the Styles and Formatting window should highlight the Outline 1 style. Is the next level text Outline 2 or Outline 3?

[bsfinkel]

> Is the next level text Outline 2 or Outline 3?

+Outline 2

If I click on the "+" I get +Outline 3.

[FJCC]

Can you post a small sample document? To do that, click Post Reply and look for the Upload Attachment tab just below the box where you type a response.

[bsfinkel]

The .1 image I have attached is a slide from my original configuration.
The .2 image is one I created a few days ago.
As I wrote, I have no idea what I did to cause the bulleting style to change, and I have no idea how to get it back to the original.

[FJCC]

The slide created later has much more indentation between the main bullet line and the sub bullet. It really looks like the line that starts with "500 STRs" is in the Outline 3 style. Without an actual document, I can't tell. Can you make a copy of the presentation and delete every slide except the one titled "My Y-67 Results - 5" then upload that?
What happens if you place the cursor at the beginning of the line "500 STRs - If 111 ..." and the press Shift +TAB. That should decrease the indentation. Does the line then align with "What about FTDNA ..." and start with a bullet or is it still indented and start with a dash?

[bsfinkel]

I made a copy of the file, and I deleted all but the two slides. I then saved it as TwoBullets.ppt. Then, when trying to test what you suggested, I did something (as yet unknown) that caused the second-level indent to revert back to a dash. I have not touched my original file.

[FJCC]

That is certainly strange and I can't find what is causing the second slide to look different. However, if I redo the assignment of each sub bullet as an Outline 2 item, they end up with the correct dash marker and indentation To do that, I put the cursor at the beginning of the first Outline 2 line, hit backspace a couple of times so that the text becomes part of the text one level up, hit Enter to make it a new Outline 1 item, and finally press tab.

[bsfinkel]

That technique did not work for me. Did you do anything with F11 - Styles and Formatting. I do not know what that does, other than to bring up a small window. And I am not sure what I do in that window to make any changes.

As I wrote yesterday, I did something with my test file to cause the second-level bullet to be a dash, but I have no idea what keystrokes I used.

[FJCC]

The styles listed in the Styles and Formatting window are what determine the default settings for displaying text. You can right click on a style and select Modify to change the properties of a particular class of text. Any of those properties can be overridden by applying formatting directly in the document. Proper use of styles is key to using OpenOffice efficiently.
Some direct formatting must have been applied to your second slide but I can't figure out how to undo it other than the method I described previously. I have to go off line soon but I will look at your file again later.

[FJCC]

I was making that way harder than it had to be. If you highlight the mis-formatted sub items and then select the menu Format -> Default Formatting, they should go back to being marked with dashes.

[bsfinkel]

Something strange is happening. I can take the two-slide document that I attached previously, and your method changes the bullets in the second slide. But when I use my base document, that technique does not work. I have again taken a copy of my base document, deleted all but two slides, and saved it as TwoBullets3.ppt . I have attached this file so that you can experiment with it, I see that there is more space between the second-level bullets (dots) and the text that follows. This may be a clue as to what is happening.

[FJCC]

Something in this latest document is indeed all tangled up but it is beyond my knowledge what exactly it is. I saved TwoBullets3.ppt as an odp document and looked at its xml code. The bulleted list on the first slide uses different styles than the list on the second slide, though when the file is open in Impress, they both show that they use Outline 1 and Outline 2. In the xml code, the first slide uses styles L2 and L3 and the second slide uses styles L5 and L6. When I relabeled the styles of the second slide to L2 and L3, I got the attached document, which looks correct to me. My uninformed guess is that saving in the ppt format is messing up the formatting. We always recommend saving in the native formats, odp in this case, and only exporting a copy to a foreign format when you need to share the document with someone whose software will not handle the native format. I wish I could be more helpful, but I don't know what else to do.

[bsfinkel]

What I do not understand are:

1) Why the second-level bullet is a dash instead of a dot; I prefer the dash.

2) How I set, if possible, a second-level bullet, as the "Bullets and Numbering" window does not let me specify this.

3) How I get the bullet style to dot and dash in subsequent slides. I tried creating a new slide, and it had dot and dot.

Somehow, some configuration setting for this Impress presentation has changed, and I have no idea how to reset it. I will keep on experimenting, as I did (as reported above) do some combination of keystrokes that caused the second-level bullet to revert to a dash.

[keme]

Saving to a "foreign" format (ppt) may have something to do with it. MS Office styles are less structured than What we have in Openoffice. When you force Impress to work with that, you may expect the unexpected.