3.1 Text

Hey, welcome back to up and running with ONLYOFFICE presentations. So we've gone through the getting started phase. You know pretty much everything about how the interface works and how to work with slides. Now we're going to look at how you can add content to your slides, starting with the all important text. Okay, so we're just working in a default presentation here and we're going to make some space to add some text in. I don't want this place holder, I just want a blank slide so I am going to right click and choose Change Layout. And then in here I'm going to find the Blank slide, so that clears that out. And now the first thing to be aware of with text in ONLYOFFICE presentations is old text has to go into a box of some kind. So up here, you'll see that we have this Text Box tool. So this, you can draw out the size of text box that you want your text to be contained by, add some text in. And then if you want to have a set height, you can drag out the size of the box to the exact size that you want that text to be. There's basically three ways that you're going to get boxes into a slide that you can put text into. One is drawing out the text box yourself, like I just demonstrated. The second is using placeholder text boxes that come with premade layouts that you can then just add text into yourself. And the third is using shapes to act as text boxes. So you can create a shape, double click and then you can add text inside and we're going to be talking a bit more about shapes later on. So once you have some text added into a text box, then you need to know about basic text styling. So we'll jump over to our presentation template from elements that we were looking at before. And we'll grab one of these pre-made text boxes, we'll just select it. And I'm actually going to select all so that we're controlling the formatting of all of these text. Your basic text formatting options are all up here. So you can make text bold, italic, add underlines, strikethroughs, change the color, and so on. You have font selections up here, these fonts will pull in whatever you have installed locally on your machine. And the same thing goes if you're using the web based editor, it will still be able to access the fonts that are installed locally for you. So I'm just going to change this font to something different. And then once you have a style set up that you like, if you want to use it elsewhere. You can use the inbuilt copy and paste text styles functionality. So up here, you can see that we have this little paintbrush. While I have this text here selected, if I press this paintbrush, it's going to copy that style. Now I can paint that style onto any other text in the page, so, if I just select this text, it's going to apply that same style to it. Okay, so that's all of your basic text formatting covered. Now, I'm just going to point out that there is alignment options that you have available to you. One of those options is, if you need to change the text direction, you can select a bunch of text, right click. And then you'll find Text Direction here, so you can have your text go from top to bottom. Or from bottom to top, you also have various alignment settings up here as well as bullet lists. Bullet lists are standard, just as you would expect in any type of Office software. And you have options for different types of bullets if you click the small drop-down next to the list buttons. You can also control alignment of text here, so we have centering, right alignment and justifying text. You can control vertical alignment here as well, so this is particularly useful if you have text like, say, this text here. Where you want the text to be positioned inside a container in a certain way. So for example, this text here is said to be aligned in the middle. But if we set it to the top, it'll go to the top of the button, or to the bottom of the button, like so. And then finally we also have line height, so, for example, if I select this text and then I increase the line height. I get larger amounts of space in between each line. You'll notice that as we have this text selected, this tab here becomes available, it gives us our paragraph settings for our text. And this is just another way that you can access most of the same settings that you have up here. So it can change the line spacing, like I just did, so we can decrease that back down to what we had it at before. So just change that to 1.3. And you can also increase the amount of space or decrease the amount of space before a paragraph or after a paragraph. And then the last setting you have in this category of alignment settings is controlling the indentation of your texts. So if I hit this button here, it will indent my text, or if I hit this button here, it will decrease that indent. All right, and lastly while we're on the topic of inserting text it's a good time to cover a couple of the plugins that you have available to you. The symbol insertion plugin and the code formatting plugin, or the highlight code plugin. So, the symbol insertion plugin, let me just make a space here to show you. Is really useful for when you need to insert things like currency symbols or copyright symbols, for example. When you first look at all these different symbols that are available. And you scroll, it just looks like maybe too many things to try to find your way through. So, what really helps to know is that you have subcategories here. So I'm actually just going to choose a different font, I'll go with a Source Code Pro. Now, in this dropdown, you can see a bunch of different categories. They give you an idea of what kind of symbols are going to be included in this large set of symbols. So for example, if I know I want currency symbols, then I can hit this in the drop down. And then let's say I want to use pounds, I can select that symbol, and I can insert it. So now I've got the pound symbol there, or going right back to the start, the basic Latin category. If I want to use a copyright symbol, again, I can select it and insert it and then I have that ready to be used. And also another way to see these categories is if you grab the scroll bar directly and drag it. And as you scroll down, it will show you the name of the category that your scroll bar is about to take you to. As for the code highlighting plugin, I'm just going to draw out a text box really quickly. And I'm just going to type in some placeholder CSS as an example. Now if I highlight this text, press the Highlight Code button. It will give me a pop up that will allow me to decide how I want to format this code. So it will automatically detect the language that you're using in your code if it can, so it's saying here that I can use CSS. I can also decide what type of styling I want to use on this code. Now, here's an example of one of the places where sometimes the desktop versions don't work as well as the online versions. These drop downs are not actually dropping anything down. So I'm just going to quickly switch to the online version to give you a better example of this. All right, so this is the online version instead. If I open up this drop down list, you can see how many different languages it's able to identify. And all of the different styles that are available with which to highlight your text. And it's also worth paying attention to, this setting here, Replace Tabs with spaces. So let's say I have tab indented this code here. I then definitely want to choose one of these options here to replace with two spaces or four spaces. I'm just going to choose two, because if I don't, what will happen is the tabs will just be deleted. And this code will be put up on this line instead, so let's just insert that, give it a second. And there we go, now we've got really nicely formatted code. So that's really useful if you're doing technical presentations of some type. Okay, so that is everything that you need to know about inserting text into slides in presentations. As part of that, we covered basic text styling. But there is the ability to do more advanced text styling in ONLYOFFICE presentations using the Text Art tools. And I'm going to show you how to use those in the next lesson, I'll see you there.