Operation Manual

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 includes instructions, screenshots, and hints to guide you through the Impress
environment while designing your presentations. Although more difficult designs are mentioned
throughout this chapter, explanations for creating them are in the Impress Guide. If you have a
working knowledge of how to create slide shows, we recommend you use the Impress Guide for
your source of information.
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 the Draw program included in LibreOffice. For this
reason, we recommend that you also see Chapter 3 Using Styles and Templates, and Chapter 7
Getting Started with Draw in this guide. You may also wish to consult 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 Gnome, it is called the Applications menu. On
KDE it is identified by the KDE logo. On Mac OS X, it is the Applications menu. Details vary
with your operating system; see Chapter 1 Introducing LibreOffice.
• On Windows, use the Presentation selection in the LibreOffice Quickstarter. Similar
functions exist for Mac and Linux; see 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 gives you a blank document
• From template 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 160.
If you prefer not to use the Presentation Wizard in future, you can select Do not show this wizard
again. You can enable the wizard again later in Tools > Options > LibreOffice Impress > General >
New document and select the Start with wizard option.
152 | Getting Started with LibreOffice 4.0