Impress User Interface
Presentation Wizard
When you open Impress, the Presentation Wizard will appear. The wizard allows you to create an ‘Empty presentation’, create a presentation from a template or open an existing presentation. For more information see Starting a New Document.
Title bar
The Impress title bar is located at the top of the window, and below the menu bar on Mac OS X and certain Linux distributions. It displays the name of the current document and its file extension.
Menu bar
The Menu bar is located either below (Windows, some Linux distributions) or above (Mac, some Linux distributions) the title bar. It houses drop-down menus and sub-menus that guide you to commands like opening and saving files, formatting the presentation, and getting help. This is discussed further in the User Interface page.
Toolbars
Fixed toolbar
The standard Impress toolbar appears beneath the menu bar and is a fixed toolbar which is always visible. It gives you quick access to basic tasks like saving, print and inserting tables.
Contextual toolbars
Contextual toolbars appear beneath the standard toolbar are visible only when the relevant object is selected. For example, when a text box is selected, the Text Formatting toolbar is visible.
Floating toolbars
In addition to being anchored at the top of the screen, toolbars can float as an independent window. Click and drag the toolbar to place it anywhere on your workspace.
See Floating and Anchored Toolbars for more information.
Slide Pane
The Slide Pane appears by default on the left of your workspace and displays thumbnails of your presentation slides. The slides are shown in the order they will appear in the presentation. In this pane you can perform operations like creating new slides, deleting slides, and renaming slides. You can reorder slides by dragging and dropping. Clicking on a slide will open it in the workspace for editing.
Workspace
The Workspace occupies the centre of your screen and displays your slides. Click the tabs above it to change the Workspace view, or select them in the View menu in the menu bar.
Normal view
The default workspace view is Normal, which will display your selected slide as it will appear in a Slide Show. The Normal view is used to format and design slides and add content to the presentation.
Outline view
The Outline view displays the text in each slide, including the topic titles and lists in the default text boxes. This view is used for adding, deleting and editing the text of the slide without affecting the slide design.
Notes view
The Notes view displays and lets you add notes to a slide. Notes are not shown in the Slide Show presentation and can be used as notes to yourself or others who open the file in Impress. To add Notes to a slide:
- Click the Notes tab in the Workspace or select Notes page in the View menu.
- Select a slide by clicking it in the Slide pane.
- Begin typing in the ‘Click to add notes’ box.
Handout view
The Handout view displays the layout for a printed handout. You can select how many slides are shown per page in the Layouts task pane. The options are 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 9 slides per page.
Slide Sorter view
The Slider Sorter view shows all of the slides in a thumbnail view, in the order they will be shown in the presentation.
