OpenOffice.org Impress Backgrounds

For someone whose living involves giving presentations, I haven't really maximized the capabilities of OpenOffice.org. For me, it's been more about content rather than form -- I don't go for fancy transitions, or even fancy backgrounds. Thus, most features of OpenOffice.org are really lost on me: I just know the bare minimum.

Today, however, while getting set to put together a presentation on open source to my co-teachers, I thought: "Wouldn't it be good to have a dark background? White is so glaring." So I fiddled a bit with Impress. And d'oh! It was actually a simple thing.


First, go to the Master View (that's View->Master->Slide Master). Then, right click on the slide master area. Click on Slide->Page Setup...


Now you'll get a background selection tab. Select the color that you want. Impress will automatically select the best color for the text.

This seems rather insignificant to blog about, but I tell you, in the past, I would manually change the color of the font everytime I used a different-colored background. It was tedious! That's why I've been sticking with black text over white backgrounds.

I'm glad I found this better way of managing backgrounds and foreground text.