Presentation software basics (LibreOffice Impress)

Hello students, welcome to Kwickprep. Your teacher asks you to present a project on saving water in front of the class. How do you show pictures and points on a big screen? Today we will learn presentation software, using LibreOffice Impress.

First, some new terms. A presentation is a set of slides shown one after another, usually on a projector. A slide is like one page of that show. A slide can hold text, pictures, charts, sound and even video.

Presentation software is used to create, edit and show slides. LibreOffice Impress is one such program. It is free and open source, which means anyone can use it and its code is open to all. Other popular programs are Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Slides.

Presentations are used almost everywhere. Teachers use them in smart classes. Students use them for projects and seminars. Companies use them in meetings and when they launch a new product.

Let us start Impress. Open it from the applications menu of your computer. A box may show templates, which are ready made designs; close it for a blank presentation. A new presentation opens with one title slide ready for you.

Now look at the Impress window. The menu bar at the top has all the commands, like File, Edit and Slide. The slides pane on the left shows small pictures of all your slides. The workspace in the centre is where you edit the current slide. The sidebar on the right has layouts, transitions and other settings. The status bar at the bottom shows which slide you are on.

Impress lets you look at your work in different views, found in the View menu. Normal view shows one slide at a time, and it is used for editing. Outline view shows only the text of all slides, which is quick for typing points. Notes view shows a slide with space for speaker notes, which only the presenter sees. Slide Sorter view shows all slides as small pictures, so you can drag them into a new order.

A layout is the arrangement of boxes on a slide. You choose it from the Layouts panel in the sidebar. The Title Slide layout has a title and a subtitle, good for the first slide. Title and Content has a title and a box for points. Title Only gives just a heading, leaving space for pictures. A Blank Slide has no boxes at all.

The boxes in a layout are called placeholders. A placeholder is a dotted box that says, Click to add Title, or Click to add Text. Click inside it and type, and your words replace the prompt. If you leave a placeholder empty, its prompt does not appear during the slide show.

Now save and run your presentation. Use File, then Save, and Impress stores it as an ODP file, the Open Document Presentation format. For a PowerPoint user, use Save As and choose the PPTX format. Press F5 to start the slide show from the first slide. Press the Escape key to end the show and return to editing.

Pause and predict. You have twenty slides, but they are in the wrong order. Which view makes it easiest to fix? Slide Sorter view, because you see all slides together and can drag them.

Finally, three tips that teachers look for. Keep only five or six short points on each slide. Use large fonts and colours that stand out from the background. Add a picture only when it helps explain the point.

Let us revise what we learned today. A presentation is a set of slides shown one by one. LibreOffice Impress is free and open source presentation software. It has Normal, Outline, Notes and Slide Sorter views. Layouts and placeholders decide how a slide is arranged. Save your work as an ODP file, and press F5 to start the show. Open Impress today and explore each view yourself.