Impress is the multimedia presentation program, similar to Microsoft PowerPoint, part of the free Open Office suite by OpenOffice.org.

Open Office also contains; Writer (word processor), Calc (spreadsheet), Draw (graphics creation) and Base (Databases). Open Office was developed by Sun Microsystems and has the same base code as its complimentary office suite – Star Office 8.

Star Office has some improvements over Open Office:

• A dozen extra English language fonts making it easier to import Microsoft Word documents into Writer;
• Star Office comes with more clip art, sample documents and template documents;
• The dictionary and thesaurus in Star Office 8 are slightly better;
• More comprehensive support compared to basic web based resources for Open Office.

These differences aside Open Office is still a powerful package and has some advantages worth considering:

• There are no licence issues to be concerned about;
• It has been translated into 30 languages;
• Available for all major operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and Solaris;
• Lower memory requirements (about half) than larger packages such as Microsoft Office;
• It uses the new OASIS OpenDocument format (ISO/IEC 26300) which means you are not tied to using Impress in the future and provides some future proofing of saved documents;
• Presentations can be saved in Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe PDF and Flash (.swf) formats.

The Impress interface has a similar look and feel more to Microsoft PowerPoint making a switch easier than one might imagine. Impress has a reasonable range of tools allowing you create presentations with 2D and 3D clip art, special effects, slide transitions, sound and animations. Different “views” are available for producing your presentation including Slides, Notes, Handouts, Drawing and Outline. Impress has a range of drawing tools for illustrating your presentations.

For added resources for preparing presentations Impress users can download and install for free the Open Clip Art Library which in late 2005 had over 6500 images from over 500 artists.

Office applications are now fairly mature with more recent versions adding mainly more complex and less utilized functionalities. This makes it worthwhile to gage the capabilities of the less expensive or free suites against your requirements when considering a purchase or upgrade.

Overall, PowerPoint is a richer application than OpenOffice’s Impress. However, unless you are producing professional presentations as part of your job, Impress or StarOffice will have the features you need.