What is Impress

Getting Started with OpenOffice 4

Chapter 5: Getting Started with Impress

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• What is Impress?
• Starting Impress
• The main Impress window
• Workspace views
• Creating a new presentation
• Formatting a presentation
• Adding and formatting text
• Adding pictures, tables, charts, media files, and other objects
• Working with master pages and styles
• Adding comments to a presentation
• Setting up the slide show
• Running a slide show

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What Is Impress?

Impress is the presentation (slide show) program included in Apache OpenOffice. You can create slides that contain many elements, including text, bulleted and numbered lists, tables, charts, and a wide range of graphic objects such as clip art, drawings, and photographs. Impress also includes a spelling checker, a thesaurus, text styles, and background styles.

This chapter includes instructions, screenshots, and hints to guide you through the Impress environment while designing your presentations. Although more difficult designs are mentioned throughout this chapter, explanations for creating them are in the Impress Guide. If you have a working knowledge of how to create slide shows, we recommend you use the Impress Guide for your source of information.

To use Impress for more than very simple slide shows requires some knowledge of the elements which the slides contain. Slides containing text use styles to determine the appearance of that text. Creating drawings in Impress is similar to the Draw program included in Apache OpenOffice. For this reason, we recommend that you also see Chapter 2 (Using Styles and Templates) and Chapter 6 (Getting Started with Draw) in this book. You may also wish to consult the Draw Guide for more details on how to use the drawing tools.