Documentation/OOoAuthors User Manual/Impress Guide/Creating a new presentation

OpenOffice.org 2.x Impress Guide

Chapter 1: Introducing Impress

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• Parts of the main Impress window
• Creating a new presentation
• Formatting a presentation
• Running the slide show

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Creating a new presentation

This section shows you how to set up a new presentation using the Presentation Wizard.

Planning the presentation

The first thing to do is decide what you are going to do with the presentation. For example, putting a group of digital photos together in a presentation requires very little planning. However, using a presentation to increase the knowledge of others about your topic requires much more planning.

You need to ask and answer many questions before you begin creating a presentation. If you are not acquainted with creating presentations, the answers will be more general. Those who have created a variety of presentations in the past will want to have more specific answers.

Who is to see the presentation? How will it be used? What is the subject matter? What should be in its outline? How detailed should the outline be? Will an audio file be played? Is animation desirable? How should the transition between slides be handled? These are some of the many questions that should be asked, answered, and written down before creating the presentation.

Again, it is not always necessary at this point to have specific answers to every question. Making an outline is extremely important. You may already know exactly what some of the slides will contain. You may only have a general idea of what you want on some of the slides. That is alright. You can make some changes as you go. Change your outline to match the changes you make in your slides.

The important part is that you have a general idea of what you want and how to get it. Put that information on paper. That makes it much easier to create the presentation.

Using the Presentation Wizard

You can start Impress in several ways:

• From the system menu or the OpenOffice.org Quickstarter. Details vary with your operating system; see the Getting Started guide if you need more information.
• From any open component of OOo, click the triangle to the right of the New icon on the main toolbar and select Presentation from the drop-down menu.

Opening the Presentation Wizard.

• From any open component of OOo, choose File > New > Presentation.

When you start Impress, the Presentation Wizard appears.

Tips: If you do not want the wizard to start every time you start Impress, select the Do not show this wizard again checkbox. Leave the Preview checkbox selected, so templates, slide designs, and slide transitions appear in the preview box as you choose them.

Using the Presentation Wizard to choose the type of presentation.

1. Select Empty presentation under Type. It creates a presentation from scratch.

Note: From template uses a template design already created as the basis for a new presentation. The wizard changes to show a list of available templates. Choose the template you want. More details can be found in Chapter 2. Open existing presentation continues work on a previously created presentation. The wizard changes to show a list of existing presentations, from which you can choose the one you want.

2. Click Next. The Presentation Wizard step 2 dialog appears. The illustration below shows the Wizard as it appears if you selected Empty presentation at step 1. If you selected From template, an example slide is shown in the Preview box.


Selecting a slide design using the Presentation Wizard.

3. Choose a design under Select a slide design. The slide design section gives you two main choices: Presentation Backgrounds and Presentations. Each one has a list of choices for slide designs. If you want to use one of these other than <Original>, click it to select it. The types of Presentation Backgrounds are shown in the illustration. By clicking an item, you will see a preview of the slide design in the Preview window. Impress contains three choices under Presentations: <Original>, Introducing a New Product, and Recommendation of a Strategy.
• <Original> is for a blank presentation slide design.
• Both Introducing a New Product and Recommendation of a Strategy have their own pre-packaged slide designs.

Note: Introducing a New Product and Recommendation of a Strategy are pre-packaged presentation templates. They can be used to create a presentation by choosing From template in the first step.

4. Select how the presentation will be used under Select an output medium. Generally, presentations are created for computer screen display, so you would select Screen.
5. Click Next. The Presentation Wizard step 3 dialog appears.


Selecting a slide transition effect and speed.

6. Choose the desired slide transition from the Effect drop-down menu.
7. Select the desired speed for the transition between the different slides in the presentation from the Speed drop-down menu. Medium is a good choice for now.
8. Click Create'.' A new presentation is created.

Tip: You might want to accept the default values for both Effect and Speed unless you are skilled at doing this. Both of these values can be changed later while working with Slide transitions and animations. These two are explained in more detail in Chapter 9 (Slide Shows).

Note: If you selected From template on step 1 of the Wizard, the Next button will be active on step 3 and other pages will be available.