Construct smart presentations in Linux
Bobby Moss is here to help you share your knowledge and make those business cases, with LibreOffice’s excellent slide-show builder.
Presentation software is hardly the stuff of legends. Unless by legends, you mean legendary dull afternoons spent in a meeting room watching uninspired slide after slide slip into the virtual dustbin of oblivion.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Done correctly, slideshows can be a powerful way to share information, draw attention to important messages and ensure people working together have the same understanding so projects can get completed faster. It can also be done in a way that doesn’t bore everyone silly!
Now, this is the part where we’d normally say, “And this is where LibreOffice Impress comes in,” but the choice of technology in this case is only one part of the equation. The success of a presentation is all about the delivery and how it’s received by the audience. Even the best-looking slideshow in the world will fall flat on its face if all the speaker does is read the text off the slides or, worse still, commits the cardinal sin of dumping long essays on each slide and then expects the audience to sit there quietly reading through it all before they’re permitted to see the next one.
In this tutorial, we’ll be looking at all the great things LibreOffice Impress can do, but remember as we go through that just because you can do a thing doesn’t necessarily mean that you should in every situation. If you distract your audience with garish colours, ‘fun’ fonts and too many over-the-top animations, you’ll have to stand and watch as their very souls are being crushed and a wave of hatred and contempt rolls over you. But if you prioritise the content, keep the design simple and take some time to practise your delivery, then that same audience will be much more engaged, energised and enthusiastic about your ideas. With that in mind, let’s crack on and make some outstanding presentations that you can be proud of.
IMPRESSING THE MASSES
Impress is always included by default with any LibreOffice installation, but if you’re using a Ubuntu-based distribution, you may want to add the LibreOffice Fresh PPA to ensure you’re working with the latest and greatest version with all the new templates. Simply follow the instructions at bit.ly/libre-ppa to make this happen. While all the instructions in this tutorial should work with the longterm support version of LibreOffice (5.4.x), we’ll be operating on the assumption you’re much more interested in utilising the power user features of the newer 6.x releases.
When you first launch Impress, you’ll be presented with a window containing a number of templates. We’ll come back to this later so you can safely dismiss it for now, and your screen should now be filled with a big white slide with two large text boxes. The one at the top is your title and the one in the middle contains your content. Old hands of PowerPoint will notice that the text section isn’t aligned to the top left and it doesn’t use bullet points by default. Fortunately, you can change the behaviour of the text box by first clicking and then right-clicking it. Under Align, you can shift the text wherever you need to, and you can add bullet points by clicking inside the text box and then heading to ‘Format > Lists > Bulleted List’. The Format menu is also the place where you can change how text appears, alter the spacing between each line and access the right-click options if your laptop trackpad starts becoming frustrating to use.
You’ll notice just above the slide there’s a selection of different shapes in a toolbar. This exists primarily to help you create diagrams, drawings and flowcharts. There are more comprehensive tools for this in LibreOffice Draw, but you’ll find that, for presentation-building, this is more than adequate and a significant time-saver. There’s also a shift and pan tool you can trigger by clicking the magnifying glass icon, which is also particularly helpful when you’re on the move and don’t have access to an external mouse.
When you create a square or an ellipse anywhere on your slide, you’ll notice that you can use the miniature squares around it to stretch and distort that shape, and the Line Colour and Fill Colour tools can be utilised to change its appearance as required.
Rotating your shape can be accomplished either from the circular arrow icon on the same toolbar or via the right-click menu, and creating a drop shadow to can be accomplished much the same way (albeit with the tan-coloured box icon).
Once you’re satisfied, try creating a second shape. You’ll notice if you drag this over your old one, it appears in front of it, but you can move it behind by using ‘right-click > Arrange > Send to back’. Much like the commercial alternatives, you’ll find that, if you hold down the Shift key, select both shapes, release Shift and then use ‘right-click > Group’, you can then move both shapes around at the same time.
GET CONNECTED
Impress takes this a step further with the Shapes sub-menu that also appears at the same time. This enables you to subtract portions of one shape from another and perform other transformations on them. Finally, to create diagrams with multiple shapes and lines, you can connect them with lines and arrows you’ve drawn manually or you can use the Connector menu in the toolbar. The latter option creates lines that stick to points on your object, so, as you move it around, the line will move with it automatically. This is particularly helpful when you’re creating flow charts for business processes and software programs.
You can also edit the properties of the slide your shapes are on by right-clicking it and selecting ‘Properties...’ Here, you can create any kind of background, whether that’s a tiled image, a single colour, a gradient between two colours or early ‘90s-style patterns and hatches. On the Page tab, you can also change the size of your slide to better fit the size and aspect ratio of your projector, smartboard or second monitor.
Few presentations contain just one slide, unless they’re being used primarily for digital signage. To create a new slide, you can either use ‘Slide > New Slide’ or hit ‘Ctrl-M’. You’ll notice your second slide looks a little different to the first: it’ll have a bullet list in its content box and an odd-looking grey icon in the middle. That grey icon enables you to import external audio or video files, and it can also create tables and charts for you.
The table wizard will normally default to having five columns and two rows with a distinctly unattractive choice of greys delineating them. To add a new row, click the bottom one and select ‘Row > Insert Rows...’ To delete a row, simply select it from the same menu. Columns function exactly the same way, and you’ll also notice that splitting and merging cells is possible under the Cell option. To change the table colours, you should ensure the entire table is selected and then simply head into Table Properties from the right-click menu. Now you can tweak them as desired by accessing the Font Effects, Borders and Background tabs.
Editing the chart is a little trickier. First, you need to right-click it and select Edit. You should notice that your entire window changes context, with new tools for editing charts. From the right-click menu, you can select the Chart Type if you would prefer a pie chart or line graph. You can also edit the values the graph uses to display data by right-clicking and opening the Data Table. That’s also the place where you can change the names of each data type in the legend of your bar chart. Finally, if you want to display the actual values on your chart, you can right-click any data point and select ‘Insert Data Labels’, and you can change their numerical format using the ‘Format Data Labels...’ option that subsequently appears.
CLEVER MASTERS
Now we have a handle on the basics, you may be wondering how to make your presentations look more professional. Doing this from scratch is particularly time-consuming, so you’re perhaps better off starting with a template. If you create a new LibreOffice Impress document, you’ll be prompted again with the template window you saw earlier. This time, try creating one from Classy Red, then create another one using Bright Blue. You’ll notice that the starting points for each presentation looks a little different. Bright Blue provides just a single starter slide with the usual format while Classy Red shows off five slides laid out in different ways with
custom controls. Clearly, not all templates are equal, but you might be surprised to discover that, when you head to ‘ View > Master Slide’, the only difference between them is that Classy Red has a custom title slide.
So what is a master? In the context of presentations, this is a preset design that all the new slides you create will follow. It’s possible to add shapes and background colours, change the fonts and move around your various text boxes.
You can exit the master view either by selecting Normal from the View menu or by clicking the spanner on the right-hand side of the window and selecting ‘Close Master View’. You’ll notice as you hit ‘Ctrl-M ‘in both templates that they continue to follow the same pattern. To delete any test slides you’ve made, you should select them in the left-hand panel and then press the Delete key.
In the case of Classy Red, you can change which slide master is applied to any given slide by right-clicking and selecting ‘Master Slide...’ You’ll notice that switching to the other one on the title slide removes the red background object and changes all the font colours.
It’s also worth mentioning that you can use the slide master to add default slide transitions and text animations to each slide, which comes in particularly useful if you decide to automate your presentation instead of moving it along with the mouse or direction keys. We’ll cover both of those things in just a moment.
Finally, it’s also possible to use the master to change how printed copies of your presentation will be displayed. To see more details about how to do this, check out the Printing handouts box (left), but in order to have some more fine-grained control, the Master Notes view can help you define how Notes pages look when they’re printed, while Master Handouts enables you to add extra headers, logos, text boxes and information to that page.
ANIMATED SLIDES
Now you know how to create attractive-looking presentations with flow charts, tables and graphs, you may be wondering how to make your slide transitions more interesting and add animations to objects on your slides. As we mentioned at the start of this article, you may want to be fairly conservative in your approach to both of those things because too much razzle-dazzle can be a little distracting for your audience, but used wisely, they can be a great way of holding people’s interest and keeping them engaged with the material that you’re presenting.
We’ll start by taking a look at creating animated transitions between each slide. You can see the toolbar for this by heading to ‘ View > Slide Transition’ or by clicking the purple icon in the right-hand panel. If you click any of the transitions that appear in that box, you should see it previewed on the same slide you’re currently working on. If you just see a black screen, you may need to ensure your graphics driver and monitor settings are configured correctly.
You can change the way the transitions behave under the ‘Modify Transition’ header. Variants removes
the black background when you’re transitioning between two slides. You can speed up or slow down the transition by altering the Duration value. If you want to entertain people, you can also choose a sound effect to accompany the transition, and if you want to annoy them, you can check the box to keep looping it until you reach the slide after the next one!
It’s also possible to define what triggers the next slide. By default, it’ll always be a mouse click, but you can also set a predetermined time to automate your slide show (see the walkthrough, below). Finally, you can apply the same transition to all your slides either by clicking the ‘Apply Transition to All Slides’ button or by setting this in the master view instead.
KEEP THINGS MOVING
Next, we can start setting custom animations for individuals pictures, charts and text. You can access that menu either from ‘View > Animation’ or by clicking the yellow star on the right-hand panel. The button with a plus symbol on it will be greyed out until you select some text on your slide, but once you do so, you can use this to create entrance and exit animations for it. The Automatic Preview box will normally be unchecked by default, but you can check this if you want to test out different transitions before settling on one in particular from the Effect box.
The Category menu also enables you to set a given animation as an emphasis effect that’s triggered between your text arriving and leaving. You can also select ‘Motion Path’ if you want it to fly all over your slide like a wasp trapped in an empty jam jar. You can also choose to trigger your animation with mouse clicks or link animations together by choosing ‘With Previous’ or ‘After Previous’ from the Start dropdown. Annoyingly, the font choice that custom animations use doesn’t default to the one you’ve selected for your slide master, so you’ll need to set this for each animation individually.
Finally, you can set timed delays for animations to arrive after you’ve clicked, which can be useful if you want to trigger several different animations simultaneously while still keeping them in a fixed order.
Experienced PowerPoint users may be wondering at this point how they can record narration for automated presentations with animations. Unfortunately, Impress doesn’t have an in-built mechanism for this, but thankfully, there are workarounds if you’re willing to use other free software tools.
For example, you could record a sound file in Audacity, import it as a custom sound in the ‘Slide Transitions’ panel and then trigger it when your first slide starts. The downside of this approach is that, if you have any other sound effects, you’ll need to ensure that playing them doesn’t end the narration track prematurely.
An alternative workaround would be to use screencasting software like Open Broadcasting Studio or Kazam to record your voice and actions as you narrate through the presentation. You can then export this as a video file that you share with your intended audience, but you do risk having to re-record the screencast or make changes in video editors such as Kdenlive or OpenShot if you still need to alter any slides in Impress before it’s finally released.