# Start up OOo Impress and create a new presentation.
# Open up the master slide view and create two new masters; make them somewhat visually distinct so that its easy to experience the pure frustration later.
# Return to the slide view and make sure you can see the Master Pages area of the Tasks page; note that both your master slides are listed as “used in this presentation”, but not “available for use”.
# Click the first master, which should re-apply the master to the slide you’re looking at.
# Click the second master to apply it to the slide.
# *Note that the first master has now disappeared.*
# Think to yourself, “well surely it’s not gone and return to the master view.
# Realize that no, the slide really has disappeared.

Is it any surprise that you see a proliferation of Macs and Keynote at tech conferences, that people think slide-ware generally sucks, or that people still equate PowerPoint with presentations?

I _think_ this is the same as Issue #43354, reported in *February, 2005*. Sigh.

Alex (CC‘s crack-graphic-designer) put together a color palette for use when producing CC publications, and Jon Phillips began using it quite effectively (in my opinion) in his presentations. I tried doing something similar for my talk at COMMUNIA last month using one of Jon’s slide decks as a starting point, but OOo Impress kept eating my master slides (and not showing me the actual colors used). So I jumped over to Slidy. The results were mixed: I was able to explicitly specify my color choices in CSS, but when I went to present the fact I had designed the talk on my Eee PC at a wonky resolution (WVGA) caused lots of font weirdness.

So as I prepare for SCALE 6X I’m back with OpenOffice.org, still wanting to use the CC and Tango color palettes. So I dug in and created a couple of palette files; you can find them on the CC Colors page. Note that I’m still not sure how to make OOo just “find” them and add them to the full palette, but they are usable and hopefully they’ll ease some of the pain.