Using a new product requires some re-learning. That’s unavoidable. But you rarely have to learn an entirely new set of skills—it’s just that the new stuff sticks out at us. This article is to emphasize the similarities between OpenOffice Writer and Microsoft Office Word; the things you don’t have to re-learn.

This is another article in my series that shows the similarities between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office (pre-Office 2007. Using a new product requires some re-learning. That’s unavoidable. But you rarely have to learn an entirely new set of skills—it’s just that the new stuff sticks out at us.

How does the current version of OpenOffice.org (OOo) compare with Microsoft Office in its ability to produce slide presentations?

Recently, a report (PDF) on a number of students opinions on OpenOffice.org Writer vs. Microsoft Office 2007 Word and OpenOffice .org Impress vs. Microsoft Office 2007 Powerpoint, whose conclusion is down-right depressing to those of us, who would prefer to see open source software introduced into education.

All your friends and business partners run Microsoft Office and you cannot afford to have any blunders when reading their documents. Likewise, you don't want to have your presentations all garbled up when you import them from Impress to PowerPoint. What about Office 2007? What about macros in your Excel sheets?

GUI presentation software, be it PowerPoint, OpenOffice Impress, KPresenter or anything else, can be quite time-consuming and distracting.

Project Renaissance of OpenOffice.org opened up proposals for "Access Functionality" design changes for its office suite on April 20, 2009. The Impress presentation application was chosen as the Guinea pig. Deadline for submissions is just around the corner: May 4, 2009.

Getting started quickly with Impress is very easy. Impress will start by default with an Wizard that will take you through 3 quick steps to the place where you will be entering information into your presentation.

OpenOffice.org Impress makes LaTeX + Beamer look user-friendly. Now that I've gone through turning my OLF slides from boring black-on-white to prettier, I realize how much of a usability nightmare Impress is.