OpenOffice.org Impress: Preparing a Slide Show

"Whenever you set transitions, you'll find them in the tasks pane on the right side of the editing window. Impress gives you a choice of 56 transitions, although many are just variations of each other -- for instance, Wipe Up or Wipe Down -- and, irritatingly enough, the tasks pane doesn't list them in alphabetical order for easy reference.

"Like many formatting features, transitions are easy to overdo. Just as you should usually limit your fonts to two -- one for headers and one for body text -- so you should usually limit your transitions to two -- one to announce a new section of your presentation, and one for ordinary transitions. And even those two might be more effective if you chose variations of the same transition. Geeking out and using more transitions is only going to make your presentation look cluttered and disorganized."

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