Creating and Delivering a Presentation with OpenOffice Impress

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Free E-Book: Getting Started with Impress. This E-Book focuses on Writer which is the word processor component of Apache OpenOffice. It covers most of the usual features of a word processor (spelling check, thesaurus, hyphenation, autocorrect, find and replace, automatic generation of tables of contents and indexes, mail merge and others) and will be useful as a reference guide when learning OpenOffice Writer.

In this lesson you will crate an Impress presentation using many of the features of Impress. You will be working with different layout styles, graphics, animation, sound and inserting charts. By the end of the lesson, your presentation will be ready for delivery.

Presenting Impress

Impress is OpenOffice.org’s presentations program that is similar to Microsoft PowerPoint. You can create slides from scratch or by using a Wizard. Slides in Impress can contain many different elements, including text, bulleted and numbered lists, tables, charts, clip art and graphic objects. Impress also includes a spelling checker, text styles, and attractive background styles.

Starting Impress

There are a variety of ways to start Impress and the method you use depends on whether you intend to open an existing document or create a new one. In Windows, the most common way is from the Start Menu.

1. Click the Start Button on the taskbar and click on All Programs
2. Click on OpenOffice.org 4.1.1
3. Click on OpenOffice.org Impress and Impress will open up

Navigating the Impress Window

When you first open up Impress, you’ll be presented with a blank presentation window. Here’s what the Impress 4.1.1 Window looks like:

Inserting Text

Impress slides have placeholders for you to type in. For example, the title slide has placeholders for the title and a text subtitle. To enter text, just click the placeholder to enter text on a slide. Follow the steps below to add a title and a subtitle.

Choose a Slide Design

There are many different slide designs available in Impress depending on the theme of your presentation. You can also create your own Master designs. Here we will add an existing design to our presentation. Follow the steps below to apply a design theme:

Adding Slides

Add a New Slide and insert text using a Single Bulleted List.

Working with Indented Bulleted Lists

In text boxes created automatically by Impress (called AutoLayout), the outline styles available are by default bulleted lists therefore, every text box included in the available layouts is already formatted as a bulleted list. Follow the steps below to create an indented bulleted list using an available layout:

Step 1:

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Choosing a Slide Layout

There are 12 layouts in Impress 4.1.1 that can be used for a variety of situations. Slide layouts are names for the type of data they will contain. For example, the Title Slide layout needs only a title and subtitle. The Title and Two Content layout is divided into three areas, title, and two text areas that can contain either text or you can insert a table, chart, picture or a movie. In Impress, you can easily use the properties panel to change the layout of a slide. When you click on a layout, that layout is transferred to the selected slide. Follow the steps below to add a different layout to a new slide:

Saving Your Presentation

It’s important to save your presentations often to protect yourself from power outages and other incidents that could result in lost data. You can save your presentations to storage locations such as hard drives, USB flash drives or in the Cloud. In this example, we’ll save the document to our hard drive on the computer in Windows.

The Save Command

There are 3 ways you can save your Impress documents:

• The Save button on the Toolbar
• The File > Save Command from the menu
• The File > Save As command

1. Click the Save button on the Toolbar

2. Navigate to the folder in which you wish to save your document and open the My lessons folder on the storage location of your choice.

3. Type the name Alaska Cruise Presentation

4. You will notice that the ODF Presentation (.odp) file extension is the default file type. This is Impress’s native file format.

5. Click the Save button

Delivering the Slide Show

There are many advanced features in Impress to present a slide show but for the purposes of this lesson we’ll run a basic slideshow with the default settings. Follow the steps below to run your slideshow.

You can move through your presentation in several ways in Impress. You can use the PGUP and PGDN buttons on your keyboard, the ENTER key on your keyboard or by left clicking with your mouse. Practice moving through your presentation using one of the above techniques. When you have finished viewing your presentation, tap the ESC key on your keyboard to return back to your presentation.

Make sure your presentation is saved as you will be opening it and using it for the next lesson.