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Latest news

26 Mar 2008: OpenOffice 2.4 released with some improvements in functionality for Impress e.g. 3D effects for slide transitions.

Links:

• OpenOffice
• Impress Templates

Open Office Impress

Impress competes directly with Microsoft Powerpoint and in my opinion does a very good job. Microsoft Powerpoint is such a simple application to use that it has become the application of choice for presentations in many businesses. Its very ease of use means that anyone can, with hardly any experience of computers, put together a predictable presentation using one of the presentation templates supplied.

I found Impress so compatible that I started using this module as a direct replacement to Powerpoint straightaway. If you only have a casual use for presentation graphics then Impress will do a very good job, even directly reading PowerPoint presentations.

File Formats

The native Impress file format is XML based .odp file. However, if you receive Powerpoint presentations then it will happily open .ppt and .pps MS filetypes. You can also save a presentation in .ppt format, so that actually you are losing nothing by switching to Impress.

Presentation Designs

Impress does not come with many backgounds, so MS users may feel a bit disappointed. However, there are several third parties offering free default designs so that once you have downloaded and installed these in the templates directory you will not feel left out.

Presentation Layouts

On the right hand side of the design screen you can select a layout for each slide. For example you can choose bullets with indented bullets, bar graphs, Title, Title with objects such as clipart. In fact there is a wide range of layouts to satisfy the most demanding presentation requirements.

Slide Sorter

The left hand side of the design screen holds a smaller image of each slide in the order of creation. However, you can resequence the order of the slides, delete and insert slides as required.

Using Impress

This is simplicity itself - all you need to do is select a design style from the templates and a layout for each slide and enter the required text using the main central editing window. At the end you can preview your slides by running a slide show. It is also possible to animate the slides.