Creating slides from an outline

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As discussed in Chapter 1, when planning a presentation it is often quite useful to develop an outline using OOo Writer. Once the outline is ready, you will probably want to create one or more separate slides for each of the top level outline elements. You can do this in several ways:

  • Sending the outline from Writer to Impress (creates a new presentation)
  • Sending an autoabstract from Writer to Impress (creates a new presentation)
  • Copying and pasting the outline from Writer to Impress

Sending an outline from Writer to Impress

If a text document in Writer contains headings formatted with the default Heading paragraph styles, you can choose File > Send > Outline to Presentation to create a new presentation containing the headings as an outline.

The new presentation opens in Outline view, as shown below.

Outline created from a Writer document
Outline created from a Writer document.

Click on the Normal tab to populate the slides in the Slides pane.

As shown below, some outline levels may have too many points to fit on one slide. You can expand those slides as described in Expanding a slide, or duplicate the slides and manually change their contents, as described in Duplicating a slide.

Slides created from an outline may not fit the space
Slides created from an outline may have too many points to fit the space.

Sending an autoabstract from Writer to Impress

If a text document in Writer contains headings formatted with the default Heading paragraph styles, you can use the AutoAbstract feature to copy the headings and a number of subsequent paragraphs to a new presentation. You can specify the number of outline levels as well as the number of paragraphs displayed.

  1. Choose File > Send > AutoAbstract to Presentation.
  2. On the Create AutoAbstract dialog, choose the number of outline levels to be copied to the presentation. For example, if you choose 4 levels, all paragraphs formatted with Heading 1 to Heading 4 are included, along with the number of paragraphs specified in Subpoints per level.
  3. The new presentation opens in Outline view. Click on the Normal tab to populate the slides in the Slides pane.
  4. If some outline levels have too many points to fit on one slide, you can expand those slides as described in Expanding a slide or duplicate the slides and manually change their contents as described in Duplicating a slide.

Choosing outline levels for an autoabstract
Choosing outline levels for an autoabstract.

Copying and pasting an outline

Use this method to add slides from an outline to an existing presentation.

  1. Create a new slide and choose the “Title, Text” layout (see Choosing a slide layout from the list). TitleTextIcon.png
  2. Paste in the text area the outline created with Writer. Do not worry if the text does not fit the space on the slide.
  3. When pasting, the hierarchical structure of the outline may be lost. If necessary, use the Demote button DemoteButton.png on the Text Formatting toolbar to recreate it so that the outline points are at the correct hierarchical level. It may be useful to open the Style and Formatting window at the Presentation styles page to track the outline level of each item.
  4. If some outline levels have too many points to fit on one slide, you can expand those slides or duplicate the slides and manually change their contents.


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