Episode: 1745
Title: HPR1745: 51 - LibreOffice Impress - Overview and Guidance
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1745/hpr1745.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:41:59

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This is HPR episode 1745 entitled 51 Libri Office Impress Overview and Guidance,
and is part of the series Libri Office. It is hosted by Ahaka and is about 11 minutes long.
The summary is introduction to making presentations with some good advice.
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Hello, this is Ahuka welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another in our exciting series
on Libri Office and we are about to start something new and that is Libri Office Impress,
which is the presentation graphics or slide deck if you want to call it that application
for Libri Office. I want to start at a high level here because as I have pointed out with other
components of Libri Office, it is very important that we do not rush into clicking buttons
and making settings but instead begin with an idea of how to use the program and why you would
want to use it. And this is if anything even more of an issue with presentation software like
Impress. It's more widely used competitor, Microsoft Office's PowerPoint, has given rise to
the expression death by PowerPoint, which expresses very nicely the feeling of being trapped in a room
and forced to endure a bad presentation. You would not want your presentations to create this
type of feeling. So what should a presentation do and what guidelines can we suggest to the practitioner?
Well, we do have a number of good resources to call upon but it is worth noting that for this
purpose, most of our sources will not be about Libri Office Impress per se but about competing
products like Microsoft PowerPoint. That is fine because we are talking about broad principles,
not about the tool specific advice that later tutorials will address.
Now my first resource will be Edward Tufty. You may remember him from our tutorial on
graphs and charts in Calc because he is the leading expert on graphical displays of information.
But for this tutorial, I'm going to highlight a small booklet he has published,
link in the show notes, called the cognitive style of PowerPoint pitching out corrupts within.
This is available for sale from his website in a combined physical and electronic version for
only $7 in the United States and is worth every penny. I won't try to cover everything he says
in this booklet because you should buy a copy if you are that interested but he makes some provocative
opening points. First is that PowerPoint compared to other presentation tools reduces the
analytical quality of serious presentations of evidence. Secondly, this is especially the case
for the PowerPoint ready made templates which corrupt statistical reasoning and often weaken
verbal and spatial thinking. He goes on to praise the analytical quality of using actual sentences
and paragraphs which can be arranged to make meaningful statements. So what are some of the
problems that presentation software poses for effective communication? There are several worth
pointing out. Presentations are relentlessly linear but often people absorb information more
effectively when they can access information in parallel. Second, presentations do not reflect
the character of the content but instead the limitations of the software. Third, presentations
place all of the control in the hands of the presenter but people learn better when they control
the flow of information. So try to imagine what a comparison would be like between good presentations
and good teaching. Most presentations are like a dry and boring lecturer droning on in a monotone
and putting the class to sleep. In such a case very little learning would take place.
A good teacher uses a variety of strategies and methods to enliven the classroom and make learning
interesting. This is a distinct contrast to death by PowerPoint. A congruent critique of bad
presentations was offered by the labor office guru Bruce Bifield in a recent column for Linux
Pro Magazine called how to avoid giving a summary presentation. He makes several good points here
such as knowing your material well enough that you don't need to read from the notes
and making sure you keep moving around the room. But the most important point is that a
presentation should not summarize what you were saying. It should supplement what you were saying.
Or put another way if you are simply reading the slides everyone will be reading along with you
and they will be entirely focused on the slides. And they should really be focused on you as the
presenter. For my last resource I want to use a very good article called seven lessons from the
world's most captivating presenters by Marta Kagan. In this article she talks about several people
such as Steve Jobs and Gary Vaynerchuk and says that these captivating speakers have lessons to
impart to all of us that would make our presentations better. Here are the principles she found in
their work. One, start with paper not PowerPoint. The single most important thing you can do to
dramatically improve your presentations is to have a story to tell before you work on your PowerPoint
file. Number two, tell your story in three acts. Why should I care? How will this affect me?
What do I need to do? Number three, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Number four, emotions get our attention.
Number five, use plain English or whatever language you are speaking.
Number six, ditch the bullet points. Number seven, rehearse like crazy.
Now to get the full flavor you should really read the whole thing on her site. The link is in the
show notes. I assure you it will be worth every moment of your time. Now most of what we'll be doing in
these tutorials will focus on the nuts and bolts of using the software and that is not necessarily a
bad thing but I wanted to make sure you had a good beginning point before you start. In other words
it pays to think before you start. One last illustration will come from an experience I had of a
great presenter who came to my project management institute chapter meeting. His slide deck consisted
completely of pictures. There was not a single word of text on any of the slides. On one slide was
a picture of bullets, you know, the kind that guns fire and he said these are the only bullets you
will see this evening. Each picture helped to illustrate what he was saying in some way but the
focus was on him, not his slide deck and he had clear mastery of his topic. This is something we can
all aspire to. And last I'm going to just mention a resource again link in the show notes.
Presentation magazine. It's an online only publication. They offer an RSS feed and an email newsletter.
So that's just something that if you do a lot of presentations and want to improve you might
find some useful stuff there as well. So with that I'm going to wrap this one up. This is a Huka
for Hacker Public Radio reminding you as always to support free software. Bye bye.
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