Editing Impress Master Slides

users
#1

As a college professor, I use slide presentations daily. I have used a variety of solutions including LaTeX/Beamer, Markdown/Slidy, and LO Impress.

Impress is obviously very full-featured and easy to use with its WYSIWYG user interface. However, I have been bothered by what appears to be a strange behavior in Impress.

There are times when, after creating a slide presentation with 15 to 20 slides, I find I need to edit something globally, such as the size or shape of a text box on the slides. To do this, I go into the appropriate Master Slide and make my changes. I then click to apply the Master Slide to all slides, but then when I go back into the slide presentation, I find that my changes are only applied to some, but not all of the slides. I then find myself having to go into each slide to reapply the same changes on a slide-by-slide basis that I had tried to apply globally by changing the Master Slide.

I'm finding that, when working with Impress, I have to carefully design all of my slide formatting *before* composing my content, because if I have to change formatting later, I have no assurance that the changes will take effect globally. This is obviously the opposite of the behavior in LaTeX or Markdown, where the formatting can be designed at any point in the process with predictable results.

Has anyone else noticed this behavior? Is this a bug, or can anyone suggest anything I might do differently?

I am currently using LO 6.3.4.2 on Windows 10, but I have noticed this behavior for years on a variety of LO versions on both Windows and Linux.

Virgil

#2

I think what you want is "clear direct formatting." In LO 6.3 this is on
the right-click menu for each object in a page, but it doesn't show up when
you have multiple objects selected, and it doesn't show up when you select
the page on the page browser.

It would be nice if 'clear local overrides' was programmable to a key in
'customize keyboard' but I don't see it there.

#3

I think what you want is "clear direct formatting." In LO 6.3 this is on the right-click menu for each object in a page, but it doesn't show up when you have multiple objects selected, and it doesn't show up when you select the page on the page browser.

It would be nice if 'clear local overrides' was programmable to a key in 'customize keyboard' but I don't see it there.

Thank you for the suggestion, but I don't think it works on my problem. When I right click on a text box on a slide and then click "Clear Direct Formatting" it clears the formatting of the text itself (boldface, italics, etc.), but it doesn't seem to have any effect on the geometry of the text box that holds the text. When I edit a master slide, usually what I am editing is the layout, meaning the placement and size of text boxes on the slide. When I apply the edited master slide to all slides, there are always some slides that don't accept the changes, while others do.

I have tested this on several different slide presentation files, starting from scratch in each case. I have been careful *not* to apply any direct changes to text box geometry on individual slides before editing the master slide. Even so, after editing the master slide, the changes are never applied to all slides in a presentation and clicking "Clear Direct Formatting" doesn't seem to help.

Virgil