2.2 Interface Overview

Hey, welcome back to Up and Running with ONLYOFFICE presentations. In this part of the course we're gonna have a quick overview of the interface of ONLYOFFICE Presentations, just so you get a general idea of where everything is on the screen. Our first stop, the start screen, which is slightly different between the web version and the desktop version. So, in the web version, it's really self explanatory, You've got all of your existing documents here. And the only gotcha is, if you wanna edit any of them here, it's best not to click on the link here, because you might open a document in read only mode. If you want to edit, you should actually click this button here, and then choose Edit. And if you want to create a document, then choose the type of document that you wanna create, give it a name, we just go with New Presentation, that's fine. Wait a couple of seconds for it to load up, and then there you have presentations ready to go. In the offline version, same thing, you're gonna see all of your existing files here. You can connect to the cloud, if you have your own cloud instance, and you're working offline, but you want to push your changes onto your cloud storage platform, then you can do that here. Otherwise, if you wanna create a presentation, just click this button here, then you have pretty much the exact same interface but offline instead. Now, we're gonna go into detail on all of the different aspects of this interface as we move through the course. So this is just gonna be a quick touch on what each of these parts of the interface do. Okay, so the first thing you wanna be aware of is this tab system that we have along the top here, which collects up different types of similar functionality. In the File menu here, you have the ability to control saving and printing. In the online version, that File menu also gives you the ability to download your file in any of the various supported formats, and to control access rights for sharing, because there are collaboration features in the online version. Now, we're gonna work from right to left on the rest of the tabs. The rightmost tab gives us Plugins, so there's a bunch of different plugins that you have access to here. Now the thing to be aware of is that not all of these plugins work in the desktop version. So for example, we have a photo editor here that you can use to make relatively basic edits to any photos that you're using in your presentation. If you want to use that, then you're better off using the online version, this photo editor will work there. You're gonna see a couple of these plugins in action as we work through the various lessons in this course. But just be aware of the fact that not everything in this area works offline. Next up we have the Protection tab, and you'll notice here that this tab is in the desktop version, but it's not in the online version. What this desktop version allows you to do is, encrypt your presentation, so that it can only be accessed with a password. So you basically just hit this button, enter a password, and now nobody can edit this presentation unless they have that password. Now, assumingly, the reason that's not in the web-based version is, the security is already handled by the server anyway. All right, next up we have Collaboration, this is another area where it's different between the desktop and the online version. You see, in the desktop version we just have this one little button here to add comments, but in the online version we also have options to set up co-editing, so you can work on a presentation simultaneously with a teammate. We have chat as well, we have a couple of different features, and again, we're gonna go through those in more detail later on. Next up, we have the Insert tab, which is exactly what it sounds like, it allows you to insert things like tables, text boxes, charts, and so on. And this is pretty much identical to the online version. However, I have found that the online version of this part of the interface is a little bit more stable and reliable. I have found that the shape drawing tools don't always work in every offline installation, but they always work online. And then, to round things out, we have the Home tab, which is basically where everything else is, anything that's non-specialized, just the general tools for creating slides. Slide management tools, text controls, theming, and a few different things that we're gonna go through later on. All right, for the next part of the interface, we have the status bar, and that is this bar along the bottom here. Here you can control playing the slide show, keep track of which slides you're up to in the presentation, control language settings, spell check, and zooming. Now, a point to notice here is that you can toggle the spell check on and off by just clicking this button, which can be really handy if you're bringing in a presentation template, something you've downloaded from Envato Elements, for example, that has a lot of placeholder text. Placeholder text tends to get a lot of red, squiggly lines to let you know that things are spelled incorrectly, that can be bit distracting while you're putting your presentation together, so if that's the case, just toggle off the spell check there. And then we just have the sidebars, left sidebar and right sidebar. The left sidebar shows you your slides, so we have a full presentation in here, you'll see numerous slides down this sidebar, and you'd be able to manage those slides in this part of the interface. You've also got commenting and chat control, a direct link to get feedback and support, and some information about the software. In the right sidebar, you have context specific information about whatever item you currently have selected on the canvas. So for example, if I click this text box here, you'll notice that a couple of elements have lit up, the text style settings, and the shape settings. So each of these sections, these panels down the right side, is responsible for different things, and you'll only be able to access a panel if it has some relationship with whatever items you have selected on the canvas. For example, this is the table settings panel, I don't have a table selected so it won't let me access the tables panel. So that just helps you to know which things are available to you as you work with different aspects of your presentation. And finally, the last thing that you might wanna know about this interface is, if you click this little hamburger menu up here, you can hide various elements of the interface. So, you can hide the rulers or show the rulers. You can hide the status bar, hide the toolbar, and that will give you a bit more space to work with. Now, if you really wanna maximize the amount of space that you have, then you can hide the sidebars as well, to do that, you just need to click the button of whatever panel you have active in that sidebar currently. So if I click this, that will close, and then if I click this, that will close. And that is everything that you need to know to navigate your way through the ONLYOFFICE presentation's interface. In the next lesson, we're gonna start getting into some more specifics, of course, the foundation of any presentation is the slides, so we're gonna start looking at slides and slide settings. How you can manage your slides in an ONLYOFFICE presentation, and how you can configure them and design them in all kinds of different ways. So we're gonna go through that in the next lesson, I'll see you there.