How to Zoom In and Enlarge Details In OOo Impress Slideshows

By: Rob Reilly
Thursday, December 11, 2008 12:31:46 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/6613/1/

Zoom In On Key Points

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?

One interesting combination is what I call “expanding details”. Expanding details start out as a point on your slide that fades out while a detailed graphic fades in and expands, all the while moving to a new spot on the screen. You can use the effect on square or round graphical elements, as well as, all kinds of text. If you use a white or colored border around a square detail, it looks much like a 35mm slide that appears on the screen.

Here's a summary of the work flow for these techniques:

How To Do It, Step by Step

Open your OOo Impress slide show and insert a suitable background picture, so it takes up the whole slide. You might use a picture of a map, for example, if you are showing the location of your national headquarters. Using a profile view of your product, might work, if you are talking about its feature set. Do you want to re-live last summer's travels? Try a panorama snapshot of that special place.

Next, add a very small circle to your slide, on the spot that you want to emphasize. Using the map example, you might put a dot on your headquarter building location.

Highlight the circle (or dot), then click “Add” on the custom animation tab and choose the “Fade Out” effect. Set the speed to “Medium”. The custom animation tab is located in the right hand “Tasks” window. Click on the animation tab or “view” if it isn't showing. See graphic #1 for a screen shot.

Add your detailed graphic, say a view of your office building, right over the circle. As a rough rule of thumb, make the graphic about 1/12th the size of the slide. If you are going to use a lot of details, the graphic sizes should be appropriately smaller. Experiment with the size for the best aesthetics.

Highlight the graphic, then click “Add” on the custom animation tab and choose the “Fade In and Zoom ” effect.

Again, click the “Add” button and this time create a motion path for the graphic. Use a polygon for straight or angular shaped paths. Obviously, a curve will give you a curved path. For those with steady hands, the freeform line, allows you to draw a serpentine path.

Draw a polygon line from the dot to the final location of your graphic. Double click to complete the path definition. For example, you might want your building picture to appear and expand from the little circle on the lower right side of your slide, up to the upper left side of the slide.

We'll need to tweak the start timing of the effects to get the expansion and movement correct.

Click on the circle animation effect and make sure that the “Start” field is marked “On Click”.

Move down to the first bitmap animation effect, which should be your detail graphic and change the “Start” field to “With Previous”. This will fade your detail graphic in at the same time the circle is fading out. 

Next on the list is the motion path animation for the detail graphic. It's shown with the little red diagonal line under the gray diamond. Make the “Start” is using “With Previous”, as well. 

Now click the “Slide Show” button at the top of the Impress screen to begin the show with background image and the little circle. A simple mouse click will cause the detail graphic to fade in and expand in size, as it moves smoothly from the location of the circle to it's final location (at the upper left hand side of the slide). As the graphic expands and moves, the little circle will quickly fade from view. 

You've just created an expanding detail. 

Enhancements

It's even simpler to expand text. Use the text tool and type out your words. Place the text at an appropriate starting location. On dark backgrounds, a good choice is to change the font color to white. It also helps to increase the font size and use bold facing. 

Highlight the text, then click “Add” on the animation tab and choose the “Fade In and Zoom” effect.  Click the “Add” button again and create a motion path for the text, from the starting position to where you want the text to end up.

For the timing, make sure the first “Text Highlighting” animation entry has a “Start” field of “On Click”. The second “Text Highlighting” animation (the text motion path), should “Start” using “With Previous”. 

Now when you view the slide show, the first mouse click will start the detail graphic fade in and expansion effect, while the second mouse click will fade in, zoom and move the text. You can make them all happen at the same time by assigning “With Previous” to all the “Start” fields. 

You can also add a 35mm slide effect to the detail graphic object. Highlight the graphic, then right click and select the line menu item. Set the line “Style” to “Continuous”, the “Color” to “White”, the “Width” to “0.30” and the “Corner Style” to “Rounded”. This will put a nice thick border around the graphic. 

Conclusions

We've walked through a couple of simple animation combinations that add a little drama to a slide show. OpenOffice.org Impress has a rich variety of animations that are just begging to be assembled into all kinds of exciting and cool visuals. Of course, you'll want to play around with the “Start”, “Speed” and other settings to make sure everything works out just right.