Creating a Basic Slide Show

 < Day Day Up > 



Now that we have spent several pages discussing the fundamentals of using Open Office Impress and comparing it to Microsoft PowerPoint, it is time to walk through an Impress presentation with a few slides. You are encouraged to follow along and do this exercise. We will be examining a fictitious company, Pete’s Linux Widgets, and doing a sales presentation for that company. The same techniques could readily be applied to creating a presentation for a club, church, class assignment, or dozens of other applications.

We will begin by launching Impress and selecting the blank presentation. You will then be prompted to select your first slide. Earlier, when we were touring the fundamental functionality of Impress, we used a blank slide. This time we will use the second slide option, Title Slide, shown in Figure 10.16.

click to expand
Figure 10.16: Inserting a title slide.

You can then click on one of the boxes on the slide and enter your text. For our example we will enter some information for our Linux Widget company. You can see this in Figure 10.17.

click to expand
Figure 10.17: Inserting text into the title slide.

You can highlight any text and change its font, color, and other properties, just as you would in Microsoft Office. This enables you to create more interesting slides. As you can see in Figure 10.17, we used some different font properties. You can accomplish this by dragging your mouse across the text to highlight it and then selecting Format from the drop-down menu. Then you will select Character, and you can then change the font, size, color, and more.

This makes the title slide for our presentation. Let’s add another slide. If you select Insert from the drop-down menu and then choose New Slide, you will again be prompted to select the type of slide you want. We are going to select the slide that has a chart and a title, as you see in Figure 10.18.

click to expand
Figure 10.18: A slide with a chart.

You can then click on the title to add some text and click on the chart to start the Chart Wizard to create a chart. You have probably noticed by now that the Chart Wizard is much the same in all the various Open Office applications. In our case we are going to add a few simple pieces of data. Remember that once you have a chart, you right-click on it and choose Chart Data from the pop-up menu. When we are done, our chart looks something like what you see in Figure 10.19.

click to expand
Figure 10.19: The chart slide completed.

Now we are going to add the effects mentioned earlier in this chapter. To add an effect to any object, just click on it once to make certain it is the object with focus, then go to the drop-down menu and choose Slide Show, then Effects. In this case we are going to add effects to the chart. You will see a screen like the one shown in Figure 10.20 where you will select the effect you want to add.

click to expand
Figure 10.20: Adding effects.

You can select any effect you want. You then click the button with the checkmark to add that effect to that object. You have a button in the upper-right corner of the Effects window that will preview that effect for you.

Now we are going to add another slide. This time we will pick one with a title section, bulleted list section, and a graphic section. We then will click on each of the objects, adding text, items, or images until the slide looks similar to what you see in Figure 10.21.

click to expand
Figure 10.21: The third slide.

You can continue adding as many slides with charts, images, effects, and anything else as you want. As a design tip, remember to keep your audience in mind. A presentation to a group of elementary school students should probably contain lots of effects and movement. Make it as dynamic as possible. On the other hand, a presentation to your city council would probably need to be much more subdued but inundated with data.

Now that you have created a simple slide show, how do you show it? We will examine how to set up your slide show’s presentation in the next section.



 < Day Day Up > 



Moving From Windows to Linux
Moving From Windows To Linux (Charles River Media Networking/Security)
ISBN: 1584502800
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 247
Authors: Chuck Easttom

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net