I have a presentation to give in the upcoming week and i made it a personal goal not to use PowerPoint. Immediately i went to openoffice.org and saw that presentation software called Impress is bundled with their office suite.
Since there aren't default presentation templates with Impress, i had to do some looking around. I found these resources:
- http://www.getopenoffice.org/downloads/impresstemplates.zip
- http://ooextras.sourceforge.net/
But in the end i decided to build my own. The hardest part for me was not saving the template, it was creating the background image so that when i inserted a new slide the background would automatically show up. Here's how to do it:
1. Go to the Master View of the presentation. This is located in the bottom left corner. There will be three small icons, it's the one in the middle that looks like a box with a dark bottom edge. This view controls the entire layout for your presentation. This is the place to put headers and footers.
OOo Impress
Very cool. Star Office comes with quite a few templates and noticably better import filters than OOo, though it misses some of the features, since it necessarily trails behind OOo's code base.
I wound up buying KeyNote a few weeks back. Admittedly, I haven't read the manual, but it seems less featureful than Impress. However, it looks very polished and is amazingly easy to use.
For my last presentation, I threw it all together in 30 minutes, used a demo version of Salling Clicker to control it, and blew everyone away.
I really wish there was a native port of OOo for Mac. It'd be great to have OOo cover all the bases.
-Dave