Impress Guide

What is Impress?
Impress is OpenOffice.org’s presentation (slide show) component. You
can create slides that contain text, bulleted and numbered lists and a
wide range of OLE objects. Impress has access to the spelling checker
and thesaurus and comes with pre-packaged text styles, background
styles, and a handy online help.
This chapter introduces the Impress user interface and describes how
to create a simple slide show using the Presentation Wizard.
The rest of this guide illustrates many other features available in
Impress that can be used to create more sophisticated slide shows.
Note
Drawings are created in the same way with Impress as they are
with Draw. Refer to the Draw Guide for details on how to use the
drawing facilities.
Note for Mac users
Some keystrokes and menu items on a Mac are different from those
given in this book. Please see “Using Impress on a Mac” on page 28
for a list of differences.
The main Impress window
The main Impress window (Figure 1) has three parts: the Slides pane,
the Workspace, and the Tasks pane. Additionally, several toolbars can
be displayed or hidden during the creation of a presentation.
Tip
You can remove the Slides pane or the Tasks pane from view by
clicking the X in the upper right corner of each pane. You can
also show or hide these panes using View > Slide Pane or View
> Task Pane.
Slides pane
The Slides pane on the left hand side of the screen contains thumbnail
pictures of the slides in your presentation, in the order they will be
shown—unless you change the order, as described in Chapter 9 (Slide
Shows). Clicking a slide in this pane selects it and places it in the
Workspace. When a slide is in the Workspace, you can apply to it any
changes desired.
8 OpenOffice.org 3.2 Impress Guide