Go through this show in OpenOffice Impress by using the right scrollbar or clicking individual slide thumbnails on the left side. This hands-on demo is about Impress graphics tools, how they work, what they do, how to get to them. Try the techniques described in these slides and then go further. If you are new to Impress do things more than once to increase your retention. You won’t be able to use this software to the potential it can be used until you know what it has to offer. Have fun and play with the tools. Impress Graphics

Click this button in the top toolbar to add a New Slide. Try it. You'll see the slide in the left side thumbnails. You can select it there and delete it with your delete key. Read the yellow text box information. Then try the suggested actions. adding a new slide

Impress offers many basic shapes and symbols. Each has an outside line (sometimes called a stroke) and a fill. You can change the lines or fills or you can design your shapes so they do not have a line or a fill. Try creating a shape in the white area on this slide. Then right-click it and explore the Line (stroke) and Area (fill) options. Impress Shapes are vector graphics. Shapes options in bottom toolbar

Once you have a vector shape on the slide, right click it and select the Area option. This will give you the window shown below. Explore these options, discover all the different ways you can fill shapes. Create another shape here and experiment with Bitmap fills, then add transparency. Text boxes are also vector shapes with the same fill options. Try changing the fill on this text box.

Your designs can really take off with all these options. You can turn simple shapes into beautiful and unique graphics. Simple shapes can become building blocks for more complex graphics. Slides can have one or many shapes that can be arranged and stacked however you like. Stacking looks professional. Having visual elements all separated may not. Try right-clicking the blue donut and sending it behind the pointed shape with the Arrange option.

Create a circle alongside this one. To keep it a perfect circle, select the Circle tool in the Shapes menu and hold the shift key while you draw. This works for squares too and works for almost all software that draws primitive shapes. Try making a square. Try a triangle – these are “primitives”. Then select each and go into the fill and line options to customize your primitive shapes. When you select a shape, the handles appear. You can grab the handles to resize the shape and when your cursor is 4 arrows, you can move the shape around. Watch the cursor as you move it around and over the handles, it will tell you what you can do.

Try selecting this shape so the handles appear. Make it smaller (called “scaling”), make it an oval. With the circle still selected, use the arrow keys on the keyboard to make it crawl around the screen for positioning. Notice when you click an arrow key the circle moves a certain distance. Sometimes the distance is more than you want.

This Color picker you see here is accessed by choosing an Area color and then selecting the edit button in the basic color chip chart. This spectrum has about 16.7 million color options. You can move the little rectangle selectors for hue, value, and intensity changes. Try creating any shape, going to the Area menu, selecting a color fill and then the Edit button to get to this window.

To change a slide background, right click anywhere in an empty area of the slide, not on any object. Select Slide>Set Background This menu will appear. Try changing the background of this slide to a picture from your computer. Impress slides have foreground graphics and backgrounds. (Sometimes there are mid-ground graphics too.) The illusion of depth is created by design choices you make with foreground and background. Warm colors come forward, cool colors recede. Bright colors come forward, dull or dark colors recede. If you want visual depth, don't put warm colors in the background and cool colors in the foreground.

When you add a photo background, Impress will scale the photo to fill the slide. If your slide is proportionally different than this screen (4:3 ratio), the photo will be scaled out of proportion. A picture background is not a selectable object on a slide and will always be behind every object you add to the slide. Impress has very good “interpolation algorithms”. What does this mean? Interpolation is the computers ability to create new data or add data based on existing data. An algorithm is a built-in set of software instructions to accomplish a defined task, such as scaling a picture.

Try changing the background of this slide to a different photo. Do you know how I made this textbox semi-transparent to even out the background foreground contrast?

Right click the monkey and select Ungroup, from the fly out menu. Once ungrouped you can see how the monkey was built with basic shapes and fills. You are reverse engineering it. Someone got paid to make this monkey using shapes with lines and fills.

After being ungrouped, the monkey gets lots of handles because it now has many separate parts that you can change individually in all the ways you changed the circles and squares. (make the eyes red, make the ears huge…) This is a raster graphic screen picture of the ungrouped vector graphic monkey. Each object in the vector graphic has four corner points and a green rotate point as shown in this picture. Slide 3 in the current assignment is where you compose a slide with ungrouped and adjusted clip art. Be sure to keep the originals on the slide.

Impress does not have the clip art gallery found in PowerPoint. So you'll have to do something different on the assignment slide for clipart. You can go online and get some clipart but most of the free clipart is not vector graphics. So I copy/pasted a couple from the Microsoft gallery on this page. You can use these - copy/paste, scale larger as needed. (Hold shift while scaling to keep proportions. In general, if it looks like an illustration and not a photo, it is vector (or was). If it looks like a photo it is most likely raster.

To copy a graphic, symbol, or text box on a slide so you have two or more, right-click and Copy,. The right click in the empty area of the slide and paste. Or easier yet, select it, then Ctrl+c and Ctrl+v. This is an animated gif. The only raster graphic format that can be animated. 0 You can access the many tools for creating and manipulating graphics in Impress by first getting the graphic on the slide, whether shapes or importing photos.

Do you have any pictures on your walls? Are any in frames? Frames will enhance a picture: the right frame, even simple frames. They separate a picture from the background, usually adding a visual improvement. Impress makes it so easy to add simple frames. The frames will automatically adapt to changes you make in picture size and locations. Try right-clicking this photo, add a frame from the Line options. Choose a style, weight (or thickness) and a color. To add a photo to a slide, first it has to be a file that you can import. Jpg is the most common file type. Go to the top menu: Insert>Picture>From File

If you haven’t viewed the shows with past DM10 student work, you should. They are worth your time. Maybe I’ll add your slides for future DM10 students. Links are provided on the Assignment 4 webpage.