When You Present Your OpenOffice Impress Presentation, Think PDF (Repost)

Note: This blog has two related posts, on PDF and links and on PDF in general. Originally published January 2006.

Do you give presentations?

On the computer where you give presentations, is the right software always loaded? Do you go through life with absolutely no problems showing your slides?

Most people don't.

You can save your OpenOffice.org presentation in Microsoft Powerpoint format, sure. That definitely works. Or use the portable OpenOffice.org. But sometimes you might need to present where neither OpenOffice.org nor Powerpoint is installed, you might not have access to a USB drive, and so on. There isn't, technically, an OpenOffice Impress Reader program. Not exactly....

What do you do?

Well, cleverly, you have already created a PDF of your presentation, which you can simply run using the Adobe Reader application available on every computer in the universe, except maybe a couple.

You won't have your animation effects or slide transitions, but as a riveting speaker with important things to say, you don't need that.

To make a PDF of your presentation, just click the PDF icon on your Standard toolbar (the top one). Name it in the window that appears. That's all.

Here's a snapshot of what it looks like in the Adobe Reader. Click on it to see it full size.

Here's a short presentation in OpenOffice.org, and the PDF copy I made using exactly these steps.

To show the presentation in Adobe Reader, you can use the Pages tab to show thumbnails and go from slide to slide, or just use your Page Up and Page Down keys on your keybard. View at 100% or whatever works.

You might not always need to do this, but it certainly does seem like having a PDF backup at all times could be a good idea.

Note: You can also export to HTML, and to Flash! Just choose File > Export, select HTML or Macromedia as the format, and follow the wizard.

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Comments

[Amos Confer]

From Acrobat, you can also press Ctrl-L to enter presentation mode. Your slides will now cover the entire screen just as they would when using OOo or PP. Cursor keys (or mouse clicks) navigate the slides as you normally would.

[Solveig]

Hi Amos,

>> From Acrobat, you can also press Ctrl-L to enter presentation mode.

Excellent tip! Thank you. I'm more of a mouser than a keyboard person so keyboard tips are always great to hear.

Solveig

[ioul]

and i have some animation in the same page, the pdf will not be with a different page for each animation BUT a superposition of these different animation in the same page, it convert one page one PDF page but don't one step.
Do you have a idea to do that ?
tahnks you by advance

ioul
one PDF page step

[Solveig]

Hi Ioul,

"the pdf will not be with a different page for each animation "

PDF isn't animation friendly, I'm afraid. But for standard animation-less presentations, it's nice.

Solveig

[Chris Charlton]

I personally also export an SWF (Flash) slide pres. Both PDF & SWF are small. :)

[Ryan]

Please note that OpenOffice isn't the only application with PDF output support. AbiWord (and all other gnomeprint-using applications) has support for PDF export through the print dialog on all linux/unixy platforms. In addition, it supports the standard print mechanism that includes PDF export on Mac OS X, and it works great with PDF Creator, a free program for MS Windows ( www.sf.net/projects/pdfcreator ) that installs a "virtual" PDF printer into your system - in fact, if you have any issues with printing, the first troubleshooting step we'll recommend is trying it with PDF Creator and seeing if it works.

Just letting you know that just as PDF can be read in many places, so can it be created.

--Ryan, AbiWord dev and win32 maintainer, AbiWord Community Outreach Project

[Solveig]

Hi Ryan,

>> AbiWord (and all other gnomeprint-using applications) has support for PDF export

Absolutely! Yes, good point. Many applications enable PDF export--MS Office is notable for not providing that feature.

[Bill Harris]

Just a belated note: PDFs can do transitions. Check out LaTeX Beamer for more on its capabilities. I don't know if OO.o supports making use of those effects, though.

[Alan]

I've not found any documentation on opening a pdf file using office org. I'm using the windows xp version. While my help files refer to creating pdf, there is no reference to reading pdf. Does that feature exist and if so, how do I activate it?

[Solveig]

Hi Alan,

You don't need any office suite, including OpenOffice.org, to read PDFs. Just double-click the PDF and it should open in Adobe Reader, or whatever PDF reader application is installed on your computer. (That's one of the features of PDFs -- the software to open them is already installed on virtually all computers.) You can also open them in a browser.

Solveig