Make better presentations with the Impress Guide 7.0

Do you use LibreOffice Impress? Want to do more with your presentations? Check out the brand new Impress Guide 7.0 update, created by our awesome documentation community:

This 330-page book explores the basics of Impress, before moving on to master slides, styles, templates, graphic objects, effects, exporting in various formats, and much more. Download the PDF version here!

Who made this happen?

Answer: our community! Many thanks to Peter Schofield, Felipe Viggiano, Claire Wood, Regina Henschel, Dave Barton, Jean Hollis Weber, Samantha Hamilton and Olivier Hallot for their work on it.

We asked Peter to summarise his experiences as he updated the text:

I am experienced with LibreOffice in creating documents. Also, I have had over 30 years of experience as a Technical Writer in many fields of engineering, construction, electronics and software. However, I am not experienced in creating presentations, so writing the user guide was an experience and I now know more about creating presentations.

Did I enjoy it? Yes, because I enjoy having a challenge when writing instructions. Also, it gave me the opportunity to write the guide from the perspective of a novice in using presentation software. I do find that in some of the other LibreOffice guides, taking the novice view has been forgotten.

And what about newcomers to the documentation project – how can they get started? Peter adds:

The main tip for all contributors to LibreOffice is to write a software user guide assuming that a novice will be using the guide to help them become more experienced in using the software. Make it easier for users to understand, which will in turn make LibreOffice more popular as it gets recommended.

Write a user guide in a Simplified English, so that it becomes easier to translate and easier for non-English speakers to use an English-language user guide. Simplified English is used in the aviation industry and is a good standard to adopt for the LibreOffice team, but needs very tight control to be successful.

Thanks again to Peter and everyone else in the documentation team for the update. And everyone is welcome to give them a hand – it’s a great way to contribute back to LibreOffice, understand the software better, and build up skills for potential career options in technical writing!

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