Impress: general features.
Impress, the LibreOffice presentation manager
Produce Convincing Presentations
From: http://www.libreoffice.org/features/impress/
Impress is a truly outstanding tool for creating effective multimedia
presentations.
Your presentations can be enhanced with 2D and 3D clip
art, special effects and transition styles, animations, and high-impact
drawing tools.
Master pages simplify the task of preparing your materials. And you
can save even more time by downloading templates from the LibreOffice
template repository.
While you're building your presentation, you can look at your slides
in different viewing modes, to fit the task you're currently doing:
Normal (for general editing), Outline (for organizing and outlining your
text content), Notes (for viewing and editing the notes attached to a
slide), Handout (for producing paper-based material), and Slide Sorter
(for a thumbnail sheet view that lets you quickly locate and order your
slides).
When the time comes to screen and present your work, you have a
powerful Slide Show mode that gives you total command over how your
slides are displayed and sequenced, so that you can focus on addressing
your audience (which slides get shown; manual or timed slide transition;
pointer visible or invisible; navigator visible/invisible; ...).
Impress supports multiple monitors, and the standardly-incorporated
Presenter Console Extension gives you yet more control over your slide
show presentation, such as the ability to see the upcoming slide, view
your slide notes, and control the presentation timer while the audience
is looking at the current slide.
Impress has a comprehensive range of easy-to-use drawing and diagramming
tools to add style and sophistication to your presentation.
You can arrange your most-commonly used drawing tools around your
screen, ready for single-click access, and take advantage of the "Styles
and Formatting" box to put all your graphics styles just one click
away.
You can bring your presentation to life with slide show animations
and effects. The Fontworks tool permits you to create attractive 2D and
3D images from text. Impress enables you to build and control 3D scenes
incorporating a large variety of objects and components.
You can save your presentations in OpenDocument format, the new
international standard for documents. This XML-based format means that
your files can be opened by recipients who are not LibreOffice users:
your presentations will be accessible with any OpenDocument-compliant
software.
You can also open Microsoft PowerPoint files, and save your work in
PowerPoint format for people still locked into Microsoft products.
Alternatively, you can use the built-in exporter to create Flash (.swf) versions of your presentations.
Libre Office Impress – Ten impressive features that you could use while making presentations
Libre Office, is a free office
productivity suite like Open Office and Impress is the application used
to make impressive presentations. This post is to introduce to you, ten
interesting features available in Libre Office Impress
which could be used to make presentations that stand apart from the
crowd. After all, presentations are made to impress/ convince people,
ain’t it?
- Hide a Slide: There
are certain situations where you just need to show a few slides of a
bigger presentation, or omit certain slides to certain audiences. In
these cases, its possible to hide certain slides from showing in the
‘slide show’ mode. Once you are finished, you can un-hide them anytime.
This can be done by right clicking a particular slide on slide pane and
selecting ‘hide slide’.
- Save the presentation as PDF file: If you are not
sure if the presentation will be opened in Libre Office (if you are
sending it to someone else/ presenting from a different computer that
does not have Libre Office installed), you can save the presentation as
*.ppt format used by MS Office (or) just export it as a PDF document.
But do note that *.odp is the open standards file format for
presentation used by leading application vendors like Libre Office, Open
Office, etc.
- Slide Transition / Sound Effects: The normal slide
shows are boring – make it peppier by using different types of
transitions and sound effects for each slide. You can open the next
slide from up to down, from left to right, circular fashion, combination
of multiple small squares etc. You can select a sound effect while
opening each slide to ensure people are woken up!
- Auto Play: If you are displaying your products in
an exhibition and want the slides to keep playing automatically, you can
do so by selecting – Slide Show –> Slide Show Settings –> Auto
(‘n’ seconds). So, now the slides will automatically change after ‘n’
seconds instead of you having to click each time to go to the next
slide.
- Change Master Layout Background Colours/ Patterns:
Well, there are a few basic Master Slide designs with every program and
what if your colleague happens to use the same master slide design in
his presentation, as yours? With Libre Office, goto Format –> Page
–> Background and choose from the various colours/ patterns available
there to make all your slides look very different from the rest.
- Impressive Bullets/ Numbering: Well, aren’t you
bored of using the black filled small circle for bullets? So are the
viewers. With Libre Office, you could just use numbers instead of
bullets, or even better – use graphical bullets in the shape of
diamonds, stars, boxes, etc as bullets in various colours like
red/green/blue and more.
- Save for Auto-Recovery: You can go to Options –>
Load/Save –> General and give a value like ’5 minutes’ (or lesser)
for save auto recovery information, so that even if you forget to save a
presentation and accidentally closed it, you can still recover a major
part of it. But please develop the habit of saving your work at regular
instants, it helps.
- Insert multiple types of media on any slide: Text,
is good. But images are better and videos are even better. So, you can
embed all sorts of media (pictures, tables, videos, sounds, graphs, etc)
on any slide using Libre Office. Do use different forms of media more
often, viewers would appreciate them.
- Insert a comment: You can insert comments on every
slide (visible only during editing the slides), so that if multiple
persons are editing the same slide, they could note your remarks about
that slide. Or, it could be useful to yourself, when opening the file
after some time.
- Insert a Footer Text/ Logo: Footer is an area
(below the presentation) and what ever is placed there is visible on all
the slides. Use it to display your company logo/ company name/ product
tag-line or anything that you want to register in the minds of the
viewers, by displaying them on all the slides.