Building a basic presentation that records and uses voice may be an important tool for communicating information. This project is based on employing two programs, Impress, which is the presentation program with OpenOffice, and Audacity, an easy to use sound editor, for building a voice presentation.

This project has four phases:
Phase One - Build a Basic Slide
Phase Two - Record Digital Voice
Phase Three - Modify Digital Voice
Phase Four - Insert Voice into the Presentation

Phase Four - Insert Voice into the Presentation

Getting the hang of It....
Open Impress, create an empty slide show with one slide that has a title and the rest is empty. Create a title called: Test Sound Practice. Insert a graphic image, the example shows the sky.gif image from the default file located at:
/opt/OpenOffice.org/share/gallery

The gallery is a collection of gifs and sounds that are installed with OpenOffice by default. Type the file location above to move to that directory to browse for the sky.gif. On a Windows machine the default location for the gallery is C:\ProgramFiles\OpenOffice1.1.x\share\gallery. It is important that you practice these file locations as it will eliminate a great deal of frustration.

Before actually working with sound it is important to understand how Impress works with sounds. One thing that is very important is to realize that Impress associates sound with an object. For example, in the image above no sound options will be available because sound is not associated with an object. However, if the sky.gif is selected and Animation Effects is chosen, sound will be available because the sound will be associated with the selected object.Sound is imported into an Impress presentation with the following 5 steps.

Step One:
Create a slide with an object so sound may be associated with it. Please understand that text is also considered an object. If you will be using text as the object, highlight the text to associate it with sound.

Step Two:

The Animation Effects may be accessed by clicking on the Animation icon or open it from the Menu Bar, Slide Show and Effects. Animation offers you the option have having text or images fly into the slide. Once the window opens you will see four choices at the top of the Animation window.

The first icon is for animation effects for images. The second icon is for text effects. Choose the Effects icon and then select which effect you would like to have and be sure you click on the green check mark to create your effect. Close the Animation window and click on F9 to run your slide show. There are some effects that will not work with objects, because they are designed for text, or they may not work with some 3D images. The green check mark will not be available if this is the case.
The Animation window has additional option if you select Favorites you will see a long list of options. Notice that you can change the speed of your animation which is by default Medium.

Once Animation effects is open, select an object from the slide, in the example the object is the sky.gif. With the object selected, choose an animation effect for the object. If no animation is associated with the object choose No Effect. Once No Effect or a Special Effect has been chosen, click the green check mark.

The green check mark is the key to making all changes and options work.

Step Three:
Now with the object still selected choose the music option for effects which is located at the top of the window and has a music note located on it. When this button is selected, several other options will appear. The first option at the top provides no color when the image is making the transition or allows the user to choose a specific color for the sound effect.

Step Four:
With the object still selected, choose a sound to associate with the sound effect. One thing to note, each effect has a sound automatically associated with it so that will need to be changed for each specific presentation. One danger is creating a presentation on a computer without sound and not recognizing that if you play that presentation on a computer that has sound, those sounds will be made and may not fit with your project. The folder at the right will allow the choice of a sound file.

If you have more than one animation on a slide you are able to order them by clicking on the order icon. Once you see all the animations, you can change the order with drag and drop to the new location.

It is important to understand which sound format will be used for the presentation as the default file type is Sun/NeXT Audio. That format may not be available in the directories that are to be accessed so that type should be changed to sound.

That will list .WAV sounds which are typical choices. This process will associate a sound with the animation effect that has been chosen for the object.
To preview it click the preview button and then click the green checkmark. Sound should be heard in the process. Continue trying sounds until the correct one is located for the project.

Here is a view of the preview window. This should demonstrate the animation and sound like you want before moving onto the next step.

Step Five:
At this point it is important to save correctly to make sure sound will work during the presentation. Close the preview window, click the first button on the animation bar and then be sure to click the green check mark. If the green check mark is not selected as the last thing that is done before the window is closed, it will not save!

That should do it, the slide preview should demonstrate all of the changes made in the program.

The process of creating an entire slide show is just repeating these steps with each slide. So far you have seen how to insert sound into the presentation. However, with a voice presentation what you need is your voice talking about the subject of the presentation. This means that you will need to both record and manipulate voice to place into the presentation. This is where the great program Audacity is of great benefit.

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