Tables in OpenOffice.org Impress: New and Unstylish
Friday, November 07 2008 @ 03:08 AM EST Contributed by: sde
Impress Tables are one of the most welcome features in the recently-released OpenOffice.org 3.0. Using them is straightforward, but they have their limitations, and you may miss one or two useful features before you learn your way around their somewhat awkward interface. Many of these limitations and bits of awkwardness are the direct result of the tools for using tables falling short of true styles, of the kind available for paragraphs in Writers or drawing objects in Draw.
The addition of tables is good news because, like slide shows in general, tables are all about the visual display of information. However, before version 3.0, tables required a series of kludges in Impress. First, you had to create separate text boxes, add borders and shading to each one. Then, you had to maneuver the text boxes next to each other, and group them together so that you could position the table as a whole. If you were wise, you would save the result as a template so you wouldn't have to repeat this process, but the initial set up was tedious, and in practice you would have to tweak your template for individual slide shows.
With OpenOffice.org 3.0, all that is swept away. As on an HTML page, you are now free to use tables as a quick way to extend Impress' limited format options.
