Is Open Office Impress better than PowerPoint?

Impress vs Powerpoint PowerPoint has been getting a bit of a bad press of late, what with it being 20 years old and all that. We’ve had such a stunning response to our free Open Office Impress templates that we decided that it would be worth putting together a comparison of Impress and seeing where we think that it is actually better than PowerPoint.

Here are a number of areas where we think that Impress is better than PowerPoint.

1. Impress is free. Being Open Source - Impress is free to download and make your own modifications. PowerPoint on the other hand can set you back at current prices around £171 or $197 (so why exactly is it almost twice as much in the UK?)

For less than this you can get Open Office Impress, an iPod Nano and have enough left over for a modest meal.

I know which one I would go for.

2. Export to Flash. If you want to put your slides online it is pretty hard going in PowerPoint. With Impress you can export your slides to Flash. Sure it is pretty basic and you lose all animation, but it is easy to put online.

If you click on the example above you can see a simple file that I created in Impress and then converted to Flash.

Colour Dropper 3. Eyedropper tool. The eyedropper tool allows you to pick up a colour from an object or from a picture. You can do this in Photoshop, but it means opening up a new application. In Impress it is a tool within the application.

4. Visual indicator on the crop tool. It is pretty easy to crop images from within Impress. You have a measurement of how much you are cropping and you can also see the area to be cropped.

Open Office Crop

5. You can import PowerPoint files and you can save as PowerPoint.

While not a benefit over PowerPoint it makes it very easy to migrate from PowerPoint to Impress. Microsoft employed this trick in the early 90s when most users migrated from Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel.

This comparison has been made with PowerPoint 2003 (which is the version that most people have).

For a complete overview of Impress and PowerPoint you can read the Bruce Byfield article OpenOffice vs Powerpoint

So what do you think? Do you think that Impress is better than PowerPoint? Please leave us your thoughts below.

22 July 2007

Comments on: Is Open Office Impress better than PowerPoint?

[…] technology. It contains a number of features not available in PowerPoint. See our posts on Is Open Office Impress better than PowerPoint? and Free Impress Templates. You can also read Bruce Byfield’s comparison of Open Office and […]

Impress is as good as powerpoint thogh it lacks templates and a wizard it is free NEPRA just downloaded open office and thinks it is as good as ms office.

impress is good but powerpoint, especially 2003 & 2007, are far more better. impress is like powerpoint 97/2000.

I don’t know if this is the right place but does any one have any points on why powerpoint is better than impress

What if I have a slideshow that has a sound track (such as the accompanying lecture) — can I export it to a video format like AVI or MPG to put it on a DVD?

I work with some small, local nonprofits and Impress/Open Office makes a lot more sense than spending good money on MS Office that can be used to better purposes. Plus, the templates available for OO don’t look like the same, tired MS stock we’ve seen for years.

[…] worse is still Powerpoint (I know, I know. My cool Mac friends tout Keynote and there’s groovy open-source stuff out there too, but we like to rock our presentations old-school here at […]

It may be important to point that your presentation files can be accessed anytime with any other application, because OpenOffice.org Impress uses an open (non-proprietary) file format.

PPT presentations depend on a proprietary application or in some other kind of import functionality (like OpenOffice.org Impress has).

Is Open Office Impress better than PowerPoint?

Comments on: Is Open Office Impress better than PowerPoint?

Post a comment