Web hosting control panel - CHAPTER 25 In Depth: Impress
CHAPTER 25 In Depth: Impress Impress is the presentation package within OpenOffice.org. At first glance, it appears to be the simplest of the key OpenOffice.org components, and also the one that borrows most the look and feel from Microsoft Office. However, delving into its feature set reveals more than a few surprises, including sophisticated animation effects and drawing tools. Impress can also export presentations as Macromedia Flash-compatible files, which means that many Internet-enabled desktop computers around the world will be able to view the files, even if they don t have Impress or PowerPoint installed on their computers. In this chapter, you ll learn about the main features of Impress, as well as the basics of working with presentations. Creating a Quick Presentation As soon as Impress starts, it will offer to guide you through the creation of a presentation using a wizard. This makes designing your document a matter of following a few steps. You ll initially be offered three choices: Empty Presentation, From Template, or Open Existing Presentation. When Impress refers to templates, it means presentations that are both predesigned and also contain sample content. Only two templates are supplied with Impress, so this option is somewhat redundant. However, you might choose to look at them later, if only to get an idea of what a presentation consists of and how it s made. Tip When you become experienced in working with Impress, you can create your own templates or download some from the Internet. To create your own template, simply select to save your document as a template in the File Type drop-down list in the Save As dialog box. Make sure you place any templates you download or create in the /usr/lib/openoffice2/share/template/en-US/presnt/ directory (you will need to have superuser powers to do this and should make sure the file permissions are readable for all users). The standard way of getting started is to create an empty presentation. This sounds more daunting than it actually is, because the Presentation Wizard will start, asking you to choose from a couple of ready-made basic designs, as shown in Figure 25-1. You ll also be given a chance to choose which format you want the presentation to take: whether it s designed primarily to be viewed on-screen or printed out.