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 presentation. If you are not acquainted with creating presentations, the answers will be more general. 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.
Using the Presentation Wizard
You can start Impress in several ways:
•From the system menu or the OpenOffice.org Quick starter. 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 (Figure 8).
Figure 8: Opening the presentation wizard
•From any open component of OOo, choose File > New >Presentation. When you start Impress, the Presentation Wizard (Figure 9) 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.
Figure 9. Using the Presentation Wizard to choose the type of presentation
1) Select Empty Presentation under Type. It creates presentation from scratch.
2) Click Next. The Presentation Wizard step 2 appears. Figure 10 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.
3) Choose 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.
Impress provides about 25 types of Presentation Backgrounds that you can select from the list shown in Figure 10. <Original> is an empty background. You can also select among three predefined Presentations : <Original>, Introducing a New Product, and Recommendation of a Strategy.
Figure 10. Selecting a slide design using the Presentation Wizard
To start with a blank presentation, select <Original>. Click an item to see a preview of the slide design in the Preview window.
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 (Figure 9).
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. Click Next. The Presentation Wizard step 3 appears (Figure 14).In this step you can 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.
Click Create. A new presentation is created.
Figure 11: Selecting a slide transition effect
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.
Creating the first slide
The first slide is normally a title slide. Decide which of the layouts will best suit your purposes for this first slide: simplicity would be appropriate in this instance. You can use the pre-packaged layouts available in the Layout section of the Tasks pane. Suitable layouts are Title Slide (which also contains a section for a subtitle) or Title Only, however all but one layout (the blank one) contains a title section, so you are not restricted to the two layouts described here.
Tip: If you do not know the names for the pre-packaged layouts, you can use the tooltip feature. Position the cursor on an icon in the Layout section (or on any toolbar icon) and its name will be displayed in a small rectangle. If the tooltips are not enabled, you can enable them. From the main menu, select Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org >General > Help and mark the
Tips checkbox. If the Extended tips checkbox is also marked, you will get more detailed tooltip information, but the tooltip names themselves will not be provided.
Inserting additional slides
The steps for inserting additional slides are basically the same as for selecting the title page. It is a process that has to be repeated for each slide. Unless you are using more than one slide master, your only concern is the Layouts section of the Tasks pane (Figure 12).
Figure 12: Choosing a slide layout
First insert all the slides your outline indicates you will need. Only after this should you begin adding special effects such as custom animation and slide transitions.
Step 1:
Insert a new slide. This can be done in a variety of ways— take your pick.
•Insert > Slide.
•Right-click on the present slide, and select Slide > New Slide from the pop-up menu.
•Click the Slide icon in the Presentation toolbar (Figure 13).
Figure 13: Presentation toolbar
Step 2: Select the layout slide that bests fits your needs.
Step 3: Modify the elements of the slide. At this stage, the slide consists of everything contained in the slide master, as well as the chosen layout slide, so this includes removing unneeded elements, adding needed elements (such as pictures), and inserting text.
Slide transitions
Your first slide show should probably have the same slide transition for all slides. Setting
Advance slide to On mouse click is the default and a simple setting. If you want each slide to be shown for a specific amount of time, click Automatically after and enter the number of seconds. Click Apply to all slides. Transition choices are found on the Tasks pane.
Tips: The Slide transition section has a very useful choice: Automatic preview. Select its checkbox. Then when you make any changes in a slide transition, the new slide is previewed in the Slide Design area, including its transition effect.
Running the slide show
To run the slide show, do one of the following:
•Click Slide Show > Slide Show on the main menu bar.
•Click the Slide Show button on the Presentation toolbar (Figure13) or the Slide Sorter toolbar (Figure 5).
•Press F5 or F9.
If the slide transition is Automatically after x seconds, let the slideshow run by itself.
If the slide transition is On mouse click, do one of the following to move from one slide to the next.
•Use the arrow keys on the keyboard to go to the next slide or to go back to the previous one.
•Click the mouse button to advance to the next slide.
•Press the Spacebar on the keyboard to advance to the next slide. When you advance past the last slide, the message “Click to exit presentation...” appears. Click the mouse or press any key to exit the presentation.
To exit the slide show at any time, including at the end, press the Esc key.
