Project Renaissance Impress Improvements – Found the required slide layout yet?

“The Challenge.
At present, OpenOffice.org Impress offers five ways how to change
the layout of an existing slide. However, four of those merely
trigger or point to the task pane. Consequently, there is only one
“real” way how a user can pick and apply a slide
layout, and there is no way doing that without the task pane.
Thinking about a common scenario of creating a presentation, adding
new slides, modifying existing ones, adjusting their layouts, one
can imagine that switching the task pane on and off over and over
again is an unwanted interruption. Keeping the task pane
permanently alive is of course an option. Yet, if you want to
concentrate more on the content of your work instead on the tools
at hand, you’d rather prefer to disable the task pane since
it consumes quite a lot of screen real estate.

“In addition, there is no way to insert a slide with a favored
layout in only one step. Currently, the default work flow requires
a user to insert a slide first, decide if the layout meets the
expectations and then assign the preferred layout if expectations
are not met. From our point of view, there should be a more elegant
solution to that, too.”

Complete Story