A new article at Newsforge that mirrors a lot of my experiences with Impress as compared to Powerpoint: NewsForge: Microsoft PowerPoint versus OpenOffice.org Impress. It’s a good intro for those people wondering if Impress can fulfill their needs.
My experiences, in brief: I love the drawing tools; I really like the navigation system (more or less common with all OOo apps); the style handling is great; the transitional tools are a little different from PP (but easily learned); and the dual-monitor setup is a little fiddly, but doable (either through enabling “mirror” mode, or switching primary/secondary monitors via your laptop). The Powerpoint import/export seems to work very well, but I must admit that I haven’t tried more than about a half-dozen. The export to Flash and PDF works really well in the presentations I’ve tried, and has proven to be of great benefit when I have to send the slides to someone. Lastly, I must admit that I quite enjoy using Impress to make presentations, much more than Powerpoint. I’m not sure if it’s because of the look and feel, or because of the better graphical abilities. Or maybe I’m just so very tired of Powerpoint. (I actually teach workshops on it…. *sigh*)
