StarSuite 8

StarSuite 8 Impress

With slide templates, custom fonts, combined audio, video, animations, and special effects, your StarSuite 8 Impress presentations will come alive.

Create Impressive Presentations

Standard & Custom Slide Design Templates
Using templates is not "cheating." It's a smart time-saver, and a great way to get an idea down before you forget it. StarSuite Impress gives you set of slide templates with text topics and logic flow for marketing plans, business reports, product introductions, collaboration sessions, and sales training. You can also create and save your own best slide designs for future use, and your friends will swipe them as their own—which is cheating.

Presentation Layout & Design
Beyond templates, you'll also get an array of pre-designed slide layouts that combine text, graphics, tables, layers, and multimedia elements. This is another big time-saver. Here again, you can customize them for your own aesthetics. If you turn them into Master Slides, they'll provide a consistent look through the presentation.

Spreadsheets & Charts
Pictures tell a story, numbers give it authority. You'll create better presentations by dragging and dropping StarSuite Calc spreadsheets and charts directly into Impress slides. When the heckler in the audience asks, "Where did you get that number?" you can say, "I'm glad you asked. Here's the spreadsheet, which I pulled from your departmental database using StarSuite Base and Calc."

Gallery
Sometimes vacation pictures aren't the best visuals to use to make a point. When that's all you have, turn to the clip art, images, animations, and sounds in StarSuite's gallery. It includes screen beans, arrows, balloons, emoticons, flow charts, office, people, and much more.

Vector Graphics & CustomShapes
You'll also be able to professionalize your slides with Impress's vector graphics tools. It gives you 87 different CustomShapes with shape adjustment handlers, 3D options, and extensive fill and shading tools.

FontWork
StarSuite Impress gives you plenty of flexibility in font formatting, but it also has a Fontwork tool that helps you create 2D and 3D fonts with flexible curves, shading, and color fill options.

Animation Effects
Your slides can also use Impress's flexible animation options for text and graphics. You can define an object's entrance, emphasis, exit, motion paths, and triggers, such as a mouse click. Impress's 150 animation effects are compatible with similarly named Microsoft PowerPoint animations.

Multimedia
For so many office suite users, "multimedia" is an elusive buzzword. But in StarSuite software, multimedia is a simple way to combine a variety of content and effects to make a bigger impact. Now you can easily combine audio, video, graphics, spreadsheets, and tables from your other StarSuite files, and practically any other source, to enhance your presentations. Impress gives you these media filters to cover the range of sources: AIF Audio, AU Audio, AVI, CD Audio, MIDI Audio, MPEG Audio, MPEG Video, Quicktime Video, Vivo Video, and WAVE Audio.

Integrated Media Player
Inserted media objects can be controlled with an integrated Media Player (e.g., DirectShow for the Windows) that enables you to play, pause, stop, repeat, mute, and view all sorts of media.

Animated Slide Transitions
With a click, you can polish your slides by adding transitions such as fading, flying in, wiping up or down, rotating, sound, and many more. Impress's 59 slide transitions are compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint slide transitions.

Flexible Presentation Options
The choice is yours: Publish your slides on-screen, as handouts, as HTML documents, or even as MacroMedia Flash animations. Also, run your slide shows automatically or manually.

Convert & Share Your Presentations

Microsoft Office Compatible
StarSuite 8 instantly converts Microsoft PowerPoint presentations into Impress and then back into PowerPoint just as fast. That keeps you collaborating with people who use only Microsoft Office. In effect, you have both, without the high cost of the other.

Publishing in Flash (.SWF)
Impress lets you to export your presentations as Macromedia Flash animations.

Portable Document Format (.pdf)
StarSuite's PDF publishing gives you yet another distribution option. It's especially good for sending slides to people who don't have a presentation program or viewer. Impress PDF slides can now include bookmarks, hyperlinks, thumbnail images, and form elements.

Open File Format
StarSuite documents and templates are also saved in the new OASIS OpenDocument format, the international standard for office software.

Learn & Use Impress With Ease

Intuitive & Customizable Interface
If you've used other presentation programs, you'll jump right into Impress. It uses industry standard menus, icons, dialog boxes, and keyboards commands. Of course, you can also fully customize everything to your working style. If you're new to presentation programs, just know that Impress is a complete visual playground, and the more buttons you click, the more you'll learn. It's a good environment to get creative.

Multi Pane View
Here's a big visual advantage: Impress's new multi-pane GUI shows you what you're doing from three views:

• The slide sorter on the left gives an overview of the presentation.
• The central pane gives you access to Normal, Outline, Notes, Handout, and a Slide Sorter at the click of a tab.
• A task pane on the right helps you manage Mater Pages, Layouts, Custom Animations, and Slide Transitions.

Improved Master Slide Control
Impress also gives you new, simplified ways to create and manage Master Slides, which set up the layout and design rules used throughout your presentation.