Creating a new presentation
This
section shows you how to set up a new presentation using the
Presentation Wizard.
Planning
the presentation
The
first thing to do is decide what you are going to do with the
presentation. For example, putting a group of digital photos
together in a presentation requires very little planning. However,
using a presentation to increase the knowledge of others about your
topic requires much more planning.
You
need to ask and answer many questions before you begin creating a
presentation. If you are not acquainted with creating presentations,
the answers will be more general. Those who have created a variety
of presentations in the past will want to have more specific
answers.
Who
is to see the presentation? How will it be used? What is the subject
matter? What should be in its outline? How detailed should the
outline be? Will an audio file be played? Is animation desirable?
How should the transition between slides be handled? These are some
of the many questions that should be asked, answered, and written
down before creating the presentation.
Again,
it is not always necessary at this point to have specific answers to
every question. Making an outline is extremely important. You may
already know exactly what some of the slides will contain. You may
only have a general idea of what you want on some of the slides.
That is alright. You can make some changes as you go. Change your
outline to match the changes you make in your slides.
The
important part is that you have a general idea of what you want and
how to get it. Put that information on paper. That makes it much
easier to create the presentation.
Using
the Presentation Wizard
You
can start Impress in several ways:
From
the system menu or the OpenOffice.org Quickstarter. Details vary
with your operating system; see the Getting
Started guide
if you need more information.
From
any open component of OOo, click the triangle to the right
of the New
icon on the main toolbar and select Presentation
from the drop-down menu (Figure 10).
When you start
Impress, the Presentation Wizard appears (Figure 11).
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Tips
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If
you do not want the wizard to start every time you start Impress,
select the Do not show
this wizard again checkbox.
Leave
the Preview checkbox selected, so templates, slide
designs, and slide transitions appear in the preview box as you
choose them.
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Select
Empty
presentation under Type.
It creates a presentation
from scratch.
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Note
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From
template
uses a template design already created as the basis for a new
presentation. The wizard changes to show a list of available
templates. Choose the template you want. More details can be
found in Chapter 2.
Open
existing presentation
continues work on a previously created presentation.
The wizard changes to show a list of existing presentations,
from which you can choose the one you want.
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Click
Next.
The
Presentation
Wizard step 2 dialog appears. Figure 12 shows the Wizard as it
appears if you selected Empty presentation
at step 1. If you selected From template,
an example slide is shown in the Preview box.
Choose
a design under Select a
slide design.
The slide design section
gives you two main choices: Presentation
Backgrounds
and Presentations.
Each one has a list of choices for slide designs. If you want to
use one of these other than <Original>, click it to select
it.
The
types of Presentation
Backgrounds
are shown in Figure 12: <Original>,
Dark Blue with Orange, Subtle Accents.
The types of Presentations
are: <Original>,
Introducing a New
Product, and
Recommendation of a
Strategy. Click an
item to see a preview of the slide design in the Preview window.
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Note
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Introducing
a New Product
and Recommendation
of a Strategy
are pre-packaged presentation templates. They can be used to
create a presentation by choosing From
template in the
first step (Figure 11).
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Select
how the presentation will be used under Select
an output medium. Generally, presentations are created
for computer screen display, so you would select Screen.
Click
Next.
The Presentation
Wizard step 3 dialog appears (Figure 16).
Choose
the desired slide transition from the Effect
drop-down menu.
Select
the desired speed
for the transition between the different slides in the presentation
from the Speed
drop-down menu. Medium
is a good choice for now.
Click
Create.
A new presentation is created.
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Tip
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You
might want to accept the default values for both Effect
and Speed
unless you are skilled at doing this. Both of these values can be
changed later while working with Slide
transitions and
animations.
These two are explained in more detail in Chapter 9 (Slide
Shows).
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Note
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If
you selected From template on step 1 of the Wizard, the
Next button
will be active on step 3 and other pages will be available.
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