Chapter 10: Moving from Microsoft PowerPoint to Open Office Impress

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Introduction

In the preceding two chapters you were shown how to do word processing and how to work with spreadsheets using Open Office. Windows users are often quite familiar with both Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. You have now seen how to accomplish the same tasks in Linux using Open Office. Word processing and spreadsheets are core functions in any business and are even quite useful in a home computing environment. But they are not the whole story.

Another one of the Microsoft office applications that has been quite popular with Windows users is Microsoft PowerPoint. This application enables you to make dynamic multimedia presentations. This product originally was intended for business presentations and has become quite popular with salespeople and others who frequently need to capture an audience’s attention with a powerful and dynamic presentation. Over the years, PowerPoint also has become quite popular with educators. Teachers, instructors, and college professors often found that PowerPoint presentations added an entirely new dimension to their classroom lectures. This eventually led to students, both college and secondary school, using PowerPoint for their classroom presentations. Now it is quite common to see anyone who makes a presentation, be it sales, classroom, or neighborhood watch, use PowerPoint.

As you make the transition to Linux, you certainly don’t want to lose the capability to create dynamic and exciting presentations. You have already seen that the move to Linux won’t cause you to lose the capability to create powerful documents or to work with spreadsheets. Neither will you be losing any presentation capabilities. One of the applications in the Open Office suite is Open Office Impress^®. This very aptly named program helps you make the same sort of multimedia presentations you formerly created with Microsoft PowerPoint. In short, it is likely to impress both you and your audience. In fact, Open Office Impress even is able to open PowerPoint presentations. This means you can convert old presentations over to Linux.

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