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What is Impress?
Impress is the presentation (slide show) program included in LibreOffice. You can create slides that
contain many different elements, including text, bulleted and numbered lists, tables, charts, and a
wide range of graphic objects such as clipart, drawings and photographs. Impress also includes a
spelling checker, a thesaurus, text styles, and background styles.
This chapter introduces the Impress user interface and describes how to create a simple slide
show using the Presentation Wizard. The other chapters in this guide explain all the features
available in Impress that can be used to create more sophisticated slide shows.
To use Impress for more than very simple slide shows requires some knowledge of the elements
which the slides contain. Slides containing text use styles to determine the appearance of that text.
Creating drawings in Impress is similar to using the Draw program included in LibreOffice. See the
Draw Guide for more details on how to use the drawing tools.
Starting Impress
You can start Impress in several ways:
•
From the LibreOffice Start Center, if no component is open: click on the Presentation icon.
•
From the system menu, the standard menu from which most applications are started. On
Windows, it is called the Start menu. On Linux with a Gnome desktop, it is called the
Applications menu; on a KDE desktop, it is identified by the KDE logo. On Mac OS X, it is
the Applications menu. Details vary with your operating system; see the Getting Started
Guide Chapter 1 Introducing LibreOffice.
•
On Windows, use the Presentation selection in the LibreOffice Quickstarter. Similar
functions exist for Mac OS X and Linux; see the Getting Started Guide Chapter 1
Introducing LibreOffice.
•
From any open component of LibreOffice. Click the triangle to the right of the New icon on
the main menu bar and select Presentation from the drop-down menu or choose File >
New > Presentation on the main menu bar.
Note
When LibreOffice was installed on your computer, in most cases a menu entry for
each component was added to your system menu. The exact name and location of
these menu entries depend on the operating system and graphical user interface.
When you start Impress for the first time, the Presentation Wizard is shown. Here you can choose
from the following options:
•
Empty presentation, which gives you a blank document
•
From template, which is a presentation designed with a template of your choice
•
Open existing presentation
•
Click Create to open the main Impress window.
For detailed instructions about how to use the Presentation Wizard, see “Creating a new
presentation” on page 22.
If you prefer not to use the Presentation Wizard, select the Do not show this wizard again option
before clicking Create. You can enable the wizard again later under Tools > Options > LibreOffice
Impress > General > New document on the main menu bar and select the Start with wizard option.
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LibreOffice 4.0 Impress Guide