Create a presentation with free Impress tool

Microsoft’s Powerpoint is an excellent tool for creating and sharing presentations or slideshows and is one of the most popular applications in the Microsoft Office suite, used everywhere from classrooms to boardrooms. It combines the ease of editing text you get from a word processor with the ability to lay out information clearly and add charts, tables and images.

On the other hand, the Microsoft Office suite is expensive if all you want to do is create a presentation for school or work and, thanks to Microsoft’s complicated pricing system, purchasing Powerpoint on its own costs even more.

There is, however, a free presentation tool called Impress, which is part of the Open Office suite. It works in a similar way to Powerpoint and can even open, save and edit documents created using Powerpoint. In this article we’ll show how Impress works and how it can be used to produce a great-looking slideshows.

If you opt to use Impress you’ll need to download and install the Open Office suite, which is a free alternative to Microsoft Office.

Start by visiting the Open Office website and click the second link down, entitled ‘I want to download Openoffice.org’. By default it will download the Windows version, which is a 150MB file.

Once it has downloaded, double-click on the file and follow the prompts to install the software. Open Office requires Java, which is included in the download package and automatically installs if you don’t have it already. Impress will be one of the applications listed in the Start Menu.

Create a new slideshow
Whatever presentation software you use, each page of information is called a ‘slide’ and slides need to be given a basic design and appearance before they can be filled with text and images.

Impress is no exception so the first time it loads it will display the Presentation Wizard, which is a three-step walkthrough for designing a basic sequence of slides. It offers some templates but it’s better to create slides from scratch.

On the first screen select Empty Presentation in the dropdown menu box, then click Next. On the following screen, make sure Presentation Backgrounds is selected, then choose a background design for the slides.

You can also set the output medium that sets the slide dimensions to be suitable for a range of formats, with different settings for presentations delivered on paper and for overhead projectors. Choose the Screen option to set up the design for display on a computer monitor or projector, then click Next again.

The final screen is for setting the style of transitions between slides. There are different graphical effects to choose from, such as fading the next slide in with a clockwise wheel or fading out the old slide using bars or squares. Some of the effects look good but often the simpler transitions work best, such as the Fade Through Black and Fade Smoothly settings.

Laying it out
With a basic design finished, the next step is to create some slides and fill them with text. The left-hand pane shows previews of the slides and, for now, only a single slide will be visible with the default name Slide One. Right-click on it to display a menu, then select New Slide.

You can create as many slides as you need, choosing a separate layout for each one if required. The right-hand pane has plenty to choose from, some of which separate text into headers, sub-headers, bullet points and columns, while others have placeholders for images or charts.

In the default screen layout, the second icon on the first row, called a Title Slide, creates a slide layout with space for a large title and some text underneath, positioned in the centre of the screen, which makes it a good choice for a presentation’s introductory slide.

Double-click on the placeholders to add some text, then choose a font style and position the text. This interface will be familiar to anyone who has used a word processor before: select some text, choose the font size, colour and style and optionally, align it to the left or right.

The following slides will almost certainly require a different layout. Left-click on the second slide, then choose a different layout from the selection on the right.

One of the best ways to present information in slides is by breaking it into short bullet points. The layout ‘Title, Text’ is a good choice, giving you space for a title and a box underneath it, with text added in bullet points.

Another layout called ‘Title, 2 Text Boxes’ splits the box into two vertical columns, letting you add text to both and squeezing more information into each slide.