Launching OpenOffice.org Impress

To start OpenOffice.org Impress, choose Applications, Office, OpenOffice.org Impress, as shown in Figure 10.1.

Figure 10.1. You can start OpenOffice.org Impress by visiting the Applications menu.

If no other OpenOffice.org applications are running, the splash logo appears while the program loads, and then the Presentation Wizard window opens, as shown in Figure 10.2.

Figure 10.2. Impress asks whether you want to begin with an empty presentation, start from a template, or open an existing presentation. Select Empty presentation and click Create to create a new presentation.

Because the goal of this chapter is to learn how to use OpenOffice.org Impress to create a new presentation from scratch, you should select Empty Presentation in the Presentation Wizard and click the Create button to indicate that you want to create a new presentation. The main Impress window opens, as shown in Figure 10.3.

Figure 10.3. The main Impress window displays three panels of information: a list of slides on the left, the current slide in the middle, and slide types on the right.

You should become familiar with a number of tools and elements in the OpenOffice.org Impress window as you create presentations:

• The current slide is the large white area shown in the center of the window. Each slide is like a small canvas that you can fill with text, images, graphs, and other types of data, using the tools around the edges of the application window and the tools in the application menus.

• A slide index is shown just to the right of the current slide area. As you add slides to your presentation, each slide you add will be shown in the slide index. You can make any slide in your presentation your current slide by clicking on it.

• The Tasks panel, which displays a list of slide formats by default, is used to change the properties of the current slide. You can alter things like a slide's basic appearance and the way that it will transition to the next slide in the presentation when told to do so.

• The drawing toolbar, shown horizontally across the bottom of the application window, contains a number of tools for adding diagrams, graphics, charts, and text to the slides you create.