Feature Requests for Presentation (can apply to the others)

Desktop editors
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1

I do a lot of work with powerpoint presentations on a weekly basis. A large part of my work is song lyric slides. The basic functionality is there but there are several core things that are absent which tremendously help my workflow:

  1. Drop shadows and text glow effects - I have a variety of backgrounds I use, so I rely HEAVILY on text shadows and glow to create contrast which allows my text to pop and be more visible, especially since my presentations are done on a low-contrast projection screen. This is by far the single most overlooked feature of the OO Editors that have been a staple in office suites for decades. At present, shadows can only be done to shapes, but not text.

  2. The “Copy Style” paint roller - the current implementation does the bare minimum - highlight text to copy the format, and paste the format to other text. This works great. HOWEVER, I work with a LOT of slides, and having to batch reformat them is tedious.

There’s two additions to this feature which would make a huge improvement:

  • Double clicking the icon to stay in “paste format” mode. This is standard in other office suites but somehow absent in OO. Currently, you copy the format, paste the format, then you have to click the roller again to copy the format, to paste it again. You can see how tedious this is across 10 slides, let alone 50. Double clicking the paint roller should keep the format paste mode active, so you can paste across slides. When finished, clicking a blank area outside of the slide or hitting ESC should bring you out of it.
  • The ability to copy-paste formats between entire textboxes. Ideally, when you’re in copy-format mode, you should be able to click a textbox to copy ALL the properties of that text box (borders, color, text format (of the first character in the text box), etc.), and paste them to another textbox. The current implementation only allows you to copy one property. If you click the textbox, it ONLY copies the shape property. If you copy the text, it ONLY copies the text property.

Desired workflow:
If I have lyrics in say, light yellow, in a specific font/size, on a semi-transparent black background on slide 1, and slides 2-20 don’t match it, I’d like to be able to click the text box, double click the paint roller, and single click the text box on each slide to apply all the styling in one click on each slide.

This is EXACTLY how it works in MS Powerpoint, down to every detail I described. It has always been a huge help to my workflow, as I work with many slides each week.

2

Hello @elalbatross

The “Copy Style” paint roller - the current implementation does the bare minimum - highlight text to copy the format, and paste the format to other text. This works great. HOWEVER, I work with a LOT of slides, and having to batch reformat them is tedious.

Please clarify your idea of this part of message. What exactly do you want to change in ‘Copy style’ feature behavior in this paragraph?

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EDIT:: I changed this reply because I went back and tested, the Double-Click feature I requested does exist. I originally tried it on a laptop with a touchy trackpad, but on my desktop with a mouse it works fine. So ignore that part, I removed it from this reply. The rest of the reply is below:

Thanks for getting back to me! I expound on the idea in the two bullet points below that, but it is pretty wordy so I’ll try to sum it up:

  • my second request was that I would like the paste-style function to apply to ALL properties of a textbox (both text and shape). It appears as though it can only handle one property depending on what you copy:
  1. the style of the text (if you click on the text)
    or
  2. the style (fill, outline, etc) of the text box (if you click on the border of the text box)

If I have a textbox on slide 1 styled the way I want it, and I want to style the text boxes on slides 2-5, I have to do the shape and text separately, resulting in twice the number of clicks it would take if I could just copy the textbox style and apply that (along with the font styling) to the other boxes.

Example: I have a textbox with a semi-transparent black background, and the text is white, bold and centered. In order to make the textboxes on the remaining slides match this one, I have to copy the styles of the text box and text separately, instead of being able to copy the textbox and having ALL the properties paste over at once.

The way they implemented this in MS office was to just take the styling of the first letter/character in the textbox and apply it to all text within the box.

Hope this all makes sense! If not let me know and I can put together a quick comparison video.

4

Better yet, here’s a video of what I’m talking about:

As you can see, in OnlyOffice I have to do many more steps to accomplish the same task that was done in seconds on Powerpoint.

6

Hello @elalbatross
Thank you for your description, we are checking the situation.

7

Hello @elalbatross
We have collected your suggestions and we have started working on them.
Thank you for your ideas!