LibreOffice Impress Review

excellent
key review info
application features
  • Clear and pleasant GUI
  • (4 more, see all...)

LibreOffice Impress is developed for creating multimedia presentations and slide shows filled with all kinds of text, graphics and animations. It pretty much takes after the popular Microsoft PowerPoint.

LibreOffice's setup operation was previously described in Writer's review. The full pack contains Impress, Writer, Calc, Draw, Math and Base, in addition to optional components. Users may deselect any of these modules and go for Impress' installation alone.

The program's interface is neatly structured, showing panels with slides (in thumbnail form) and tasks dedicated to master pages, layouts, table design, custom animations, and slide transitions. Those accustomed to PowerPoint shouldn't experience any issues in discovering Impress' features.

It integrates a few templates of presentation backgrounds with various themes, giving the possibility of creating new ones for further use. The list of supported formats for saving presentations covers ODP, OTP, SXI (OpenOffice.org 1.0), FODP (flat XML) and Microsoft PowerPoint (version 97 through 2010).

An alternative is to export presentations to PDF format, in order to preserve the formatting attributes intact, regardless of the program used to open the file.

This makes room for PDF configuration such as page range, image compression mode, watermark signing, OpenDocument embedding, PDF forms, and content type exporting (e.g. bookmarks, comments, hidden pages), together with the initial view (shown panes, magnification level, page layout mode), user interface (e.g. hide menus, use transition effects), links (e.g. export bookmarks as named destinations) and security (e.g. file encryption, set permissions).

Apart from PDF, it is possible to export content to images, where all popular types are supported like BMP, EMF, GIF, JPEG, PNG and TIF, as well as to preview files in the web browser to ready them for online publishing (HTM, HTML, XHTML or SWF for Adobe Flash integration). They can be directly sent as documents via email as well (default client).

Impress holds drawing tools that focus on selection, lines, line ends with arrows, rectangles, ellipses, text, curves, connectors, basic and symbol shapes, block arrows, flowcharts, fontwork styles, (similar to clip art), callouts and stars.

Drawing modes with points and glue points are included too. Plus, external images can be imported into the presentation, along with gallery pictures (e.g. background, diagrams, sounds, text shapes).

As far as other editing options are concerned, it is possible to duplicate objects, use a search and replace function with filters, insert links and plugins, as well as enter ImageMap editing mode to tweak the selected picture.

The viewing perspective may be toggled between normal, outline, and slide sorter. The last one enables the presentation to run in full screen, starting with the first slide after rearranging them. Meanwhile, notes can be easily attached to the pages just like writing text in a common word processor.

The presentation can be converted to color, grayscale or black and white, while grids and rulers can be enabled to increase accuracy when tweaking objects and measuring them, respectively. Numerous toolbars are part of LibreOffice Impress, and exploring each one's features may easily become a time-consuming process. For example, special effects and 2D/3D custom animation (e.g. from text) may be applied to highlight important ideas or tasks.

Thanks to the task pane, users may easily modify the master pages (e.g. text format, date and time area, header and footer) and replace them with templates or recently used pages, browse through different layouts until finding one fit for the presentation, generate paper-based material using handouts, as well as insert tables with predefined or custom designs. If the project contains effects, these can be altered from the task pane (e.g. speed), while different transitions may be applied to different slides with custom settings (e.g. speed, sound).
Objects that can be inserted into the project revolve around slides (including duplicates), page numbers, date and time stamps, page count or numbers, comments, special characters, hyperlinks, animated images, pictures (from file, photo album or scan), tables, movies and sound, charts, floating frames, floating frames, OLE objects, plugins, formulas, and external files.
In addition, Impress features support for multiple monitors, preset styles and formatting functions (just like in Writer and Calc), spelling and language tools, a gallery with built-in graphical objects, an integrated media player, color replacer, rehearsal timings for slide shows, macros, as well as digital signatures.
The “Options” panel dedicated to the entire program is pretty much the same as in Writer and Calc. It is possible to edit user information, customize colors for all notable elements of the UI, edit font settings, or modify default saving options. Additionally, remote control can be enabled for presentations, together with a presenter console. Making rulers and the grid invisible, snapping lines when moving, and setting the printing quality are some of the other settings that can be adjusted.

The Good

All components of LibreOffice have the same positive characteristics in common. Just like the other ones, Impress has a rich set of features and customization options. Its interface can be personalized in almost every aspect, while users may resort to numerous presets for quickly designing projects, whether they are background, styles and formatting attributes, or any kind of graphical items.

LibreOffice is multilingual, works on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X), and supports a lot of file extensions for saving projects. Help documentation is available, while all keyboard shortcuts can be remapped into anything else.

The suite performs well on all Windows editions (including 8 and 8.1, 32 bit and 64 bit). It leaves minimal footprint on system resources most of the time. The portable equivalent is Portable LibreOffice.

The Bad

Impress was unsuccessful in its attempt to display some parts of imported PowerPoint presentations.

The Truth

Considering that LibreOffice is free (unlike Microsoft Office), Impress bundles an impressive (pun intended) range of features for creating and designing presentations. Users should be thrilled with its capabilities.

NOTE: Make sure to check out our reviews for LibreOffice Writer, LibreOffice Calc,LibreOffice Draw and LibreOffice Math.

user interface 5
features 4
ease of use 4
pricing / value 5


final rating 5
Editor's review
excellent