Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Doing incremental reveal in Open Office Impress

I like doing presentations with incremental reveal on my points, where one point comes up on the screen for each mouse click. Powerpoint calls this something like 'animate by 1st level paragraph'. To get this to work in open office impress:

  • Click on your text box, then custom animation in the task pane on the right hand side
  • Click Add...
  • Select Appear
  • Right click the animation that appears in the box and select Effect Options...
  • On the Text Animation tab, choose 'Group Text: By 1st level paragraphs'

So intuitive! I couldn't get it to apply to all slides by doing this to the master so I just did it to one slide then used 'Duplicate Slide'.

Well done to both Powerpoint and OO for making it easy to do all sorts of distracting and stupid flying animations but hiding useful features under a maze of configuration.

HOWTO Install OpenOffice Dictionaries

If you don't have dictionaries installed OpenOffice will do a spellcheck and tell you there were no errors. Not exactly the best result - it should say it doesn't have any dictionaries installed. To install openoffice dictionaries go to:

File|Wizards|Install new dictionaries...