TDF Community Blog

Marcial Machado recently posted on Reddit about his “fully-featured LibreOffice Impress template for creating Jeopardy-style games. Just add your questions and categories, and you’re good to go!” So let’s find out more…

What does the template do?

At its core, the template is meant to emulate what a game of Jeopardy is like. You can click on any of the squares on the game board and it will send you to the slide with the associated question, where you can either return to the board in the case of a misclick, or reveal the answer to the question. Returning to the board from the revealed answer slide will erase the square you clicked on to clearly show which questions are left to be answered.

You can also use the green and red arrows at the top to give and remove points to up to 6 teams in increments of 100, in order to keep track of everyone’s correctly- and incorrectly-guessed answers. Once the board’s cleared, you can click the pink button at the bottom right to clearly display the top three teams and the points they earned. I made sure to include details on how to edit, and use, the template in the first two slides!

Why did you develop it?

The simple reason for why I developed this template was because: I use LibreOffice, I wanted a Jeopardy presentation that worked in LibreOffice, and I couldn’t find one. The more verbose reason is that there is a comparative dearth of visually-appealing presentation templates in the OPT world than there is in the PPTX world; this is no fault of the creators of OPT templates, but rather because the proprietary nature of something like PowerPoint incentivizes templates made for profit, whereas most people who create LibreOffice Impress templates do it out of interest.

This necessarily means that there are just less people making LibreOffice Impress templates in total, without mentioning the much smaller userbase LibreOffice has compared with Microsoft Office. Now, some PowerPoint files do work in Impress, and the work done by the dev team and contributors is commendable, but a converted document is still a converted document. Formatting might be slightly off, and macros are almost always a bust. Since I realized I wanted this Jeopardy project to exist, and realizing my own frustration with the fact that such a project didn’t exist already, I went ahead and tried it out myself, and then released it to the public!

Do you have any tips for other people interested in creating templates in LibreOffice?

I have a few:

• Focus on a problem you, yourself, have. You’ll be much more eager to bring a project to completion and to a high level of quality if you have a vetted interest in the final product.

• Tell yourself that no one, ever, is going to make what you want to be made. The problem with a community of like-minded contributors is that everyone thinks everyone else is likely to fix the problem they have, so there’s a huge diffusion of responsibility; think of walking past some trash on the sidewalk and thinking, “someone else will pick that up eventually.” No! You be the one who throws it in the trash! In the same way, once you realize there’s an issue you can fix, or you can learn how to fix, be the one to fix it – no one else is gonna fix it for you!

• Be patient. Like, really patient. Because no one is gonna fix this problem for you, you have all the time in the world to get it right. Read some documentation, go to some forums, sit on it a few days. Maybe get some feedback. Depend on time and on others to both find motivation and create a better end-product. The Jeopardy template I ended up releasing was the third completed project I made!

Get the template from here