Creating a New Presentation

Apache OpenOffice 4.1 Impress Guide

Chapter 1: Introducing Impress

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• What is Impress?
• Starting Impress
• The Main Impress Window
  • Slides Pane
  • Sidebar
  • Workspace
  • Toolbars
  • Status Bar
  • Navigator
• Workspace Views
  • Normal View
  • Outline View
  • Notes View
  • Handout View
  • Slide Sorter View
    • Customizing Slide Sorter View
    • Moving a Slide Using Slide Sorter
    • Selecting and Moving Groups of Slides
    • Working in Slide Sorter View
    • Renaming Slides
• Creating a New Presentation
• Formatting a Presentation
  • Inserting Slides
  • Selecting a Layout
  • Modifying the Slide Elements
    • Inserting Text
    • Inserting a Table
    • Inserting a Picture
    • Inserting a Chart
    • Inserting a Movie
  • Modifying the Appearance of Slides
  • Modifying the Slide Show
    • Custom Animations
    • Slide Transitions
• 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.

First decide on the purpose of the presentation. Then, plan the presentation. Although you can make changes as you go, having an idea of who the audience will be, the structure and content of the presentation, and how the presentation will be delivered, will save you time and effort from the start.

When you start Impress, the Presentation Wizard appears.

Figure 11. Choosing the type of presentation

If you do not want the wizard to start every time you start Impress, select the Do not show this wizard again option. You can enable the wizard again later by going to Tools → Options → OpenOffice Impress → General and selecting the Start with wizard option. Leave the Preview option selected, so templates, slide designs, and slide transitions appear in the preview box as you choose them.

1. Under Type, choose one of the options:
   • Empty presentation creates a blank presentation.
   • 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. Choose the one you want.
2. Click  Next . Figure 12 shows the Presentation Wizard step 2 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.
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 Figure 12. When you click an item, a preview of the slide design appears in the Preview window. <Original> is an empty background.
   
   Impress contains three choices under Presentations:
   

• <Original> is for a blank presentation slide design.
• Both Introducing a New Product and Recommendation of a Strategy have their own prepackaged slide designs. Each design appears in the Preview window when its name is clicked.

Figure 12. Selecting a slide design

To start with a blank presentation, select <Original>. Click an item to see a preview of the slide design in the Preview window.

Introducing a New Product and Recommendation of a Strategy are prepackaged presentation templates. They can be used to create a presentation by choosing From template in the first step (Figure 11).

4. Select how the presentation will be used under Select an output medium. Most often, presentations are created for display on a computer monitor, so you would select Screen. You can change the page format at any time.

The default Screen page is optimized for a 4:3 display (28cm x 21cm), so it is not suitable for modern widescreen displays. You can change the slide size at any time, switching to Normal view and selecting Format → Page.

5. Click  Next . The Presentation Wizard step 3 appears.
   
   Choose the desired slide transition from the Effect drop-down menu.
   
   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.

Figure 13: Selecting a slide transition effect

6. Click  Create . A new presentation is created.

Unless you are skilled at creating presentations, you might want to accept the default values for both Effect and Speed. 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).

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. These pages are not described here.