Great free program from Opensource

bob733 · Post by **bob733** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 3:12 pm

There is a a great free application you all might want to look at. I was looking for a program that would take objects and move (animate) them along a moving path.

I went to a web site (Experts-exchange.com) to see about one. One of the responses led me to http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html

this is several programs wrapped into one that work with Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc. It is free (unless you want to donate).

I needed the IMPRESS portion of it as I wanted to animate text on a moving path. It can do it.

Anyway, You all might want to take a look at it and see if you could use it.

Bob

Ron P. · Post by **Ron P.** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 3:30 pm

Yes Impress is part of the Open Office Suite (OOS), which is the open source answer to M$'s Power-Point. I've been using this as alternative to M$ Office for a few years now.

I'll add this to our Free Stuff for Use with Ulead Products.

Thanks for sharing this..

bob733 · Post by **bob733** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 5:52 pm

Adding it to the Free stuff (another great web page in its own rite), is a good thing.

And I would also like to add that if you go to Youtube.com and key in Impress tutorials, there are around 15 videos explaining all aspects of the application. And, there are links from these to other video tutorials.

I have found youtube to be an excellent source of all kinds of tutorials and would suspect it puts pay for play web sites in a difficult positions (why pay for tutorials when you can get many many subjects free via Youtube.)

Bob

Post by **Ken Berry** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 9:01 pm

I don't mean to sound thick, but is there no way to download just the Impress program to try it out? The only download link I can find is to the whole Open Office suite, and I don't want that as I am more than happy with Microsoft Office 2007...

Ron P. · Post by **Ron P.** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 11:05 pm

No I don't believe you can Ken. It's an entire package. It's been awhile since I've installed it, so I can't recall if you can choose to just install Impress..

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Sun Jan 20, 2008 1:04 am

Looks like quite a good package. To be honest I am not all that happy with Microsoft Office 2007, the new interface with its "Ribbon" is nothing like past versions and so even simple tasks become a steep learning curve.

This package reminds me of the open source programs that came with Mandrake Linux 9.0. I remember that, although you could download everything for free but in those days I was on a 28k modem, I bought the discs. a set of 5 for about ¢G30 (GBP)

Installation from a blank hard drive took about 30 minutes during which Linux installed the operating system, several choices of desktop, several high quality games and an entire Office suite not unlike the one mentioned above.
It could even open Microsoft Office documents spreadsheets and databases.

Pity my current main desktop computer has issues with that version of Linux. I may have to put a spare hard drive in my other desktop computer to see if it works on that one. Just too much of a time management problem at the moment.