Animation is one of the less-known features in OpenOffice.org Impress. Its most obvious uses are for transitions for individual objects on a slide (rather than for the entire slide), or for dramatic emphasis and calling attention to objects.

With Labour Day past, we back in the season of slide shows -- million of them daily in both academia and business. For over a decade now, slide shows have become an accepted prop for public speaking, regardless of whether they are useful or well-designed, and the trend shows no sign of slowing.

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

Once you finish adding content to your presentation in Impress, your efforts aren't over yet. You still need to prepare how you will deliver it.

Everybody knows that you can liven up your OpenOffice.org Impress slide shows with animations. Did you know that you can also use several animation techniques, in combination, to really draw attention to your key points?

Since slide shows are graphical themselves, most people associate them with GUI programs. Yet you can build slide shows just as effectively with some of the simplest and oldest of GNU/Linux tools. A case in point is LaTeX Beamer, which adds extensions to the classic LaTeX typesetting program to produce PDF presentations.

I swear, a colleague of mine prided himself on filling every square inch of a slide with just text. It drove me nuts. How about video clips?"

Continuing in this series of slide show backgrounds, in this article I will explain the process of creating a set of desktop backgrounds that will transition like a slide-show in XFCE. Note that I am using XFCE version 4.6.0 in this tutorial. Other versions may be able to use this tip, but the screen shots may look different. See corresponding howtos for GNOME, and KDE3 also.

Media sharing is changing the world, and from a technology standpoint, it's not hard to do. This article shows how to put an Ajax front end on a simple Web video-hosting application.