So far, the text we have created uses the default presentation formatting and style.

OpenOffice gives you a lot of control when it comes to formatting and positioning text.

Although the text is already formatted the way we want it for the sample slide, let's take a minute and look at how to change text formatting and modify text layout in OpenOffice.org Impress.

When you use the text tool or select a text object, you will notice that the interface changes to provide access to several text formatting controls.

The text object bar lets you change fonts and font size. It lets you specify whether the text should aligned to the left, to the center, to the right, or the align text to both the left and right.

It you are dealing with multiple lines of text, you can increase or decrease the spacing between lines.

There are several buttons on the text object bar related to numbering and bullets. There is a button the toggles bullets on and off for the paragraph, and a button that lets you specify bullet formatting options. We used these controls in the “creating a bulleted list” section of this workshop. The arrows allow you to indent items in a list or to change their position in the list hierarchy.

The next button provides access to several more screens of font, font effects and positioning options. A preview window near the bottom of the screen makes it easy to see what these options do.

There is a paragraph option button that lets you control items related to paragraphs such as indents & spacing, paragraph alignment and tabs.

Although using these text formatting controls is simple, you may want to consider using styles for text formatting. Styles can save you a lot of time and make your documents easier to maintain. We'll learn about creating and using styles in the working smarter section of the program.