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.

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