But is this as easy as it might seem? If you already know how to create a presentation in OpenOffice Impress – yes. If you’re not sue how to create a very basic presentation then you might want to figure that process out before embarking on the creation of flash cards. Either way, you can install the extension so that when you have mastered the basic presentation, you are ready to go.

Getting and installing

Installing this extension is like installing any OpenOffice extension. The first thing you need to do is download the extension file. Once you have that file downloaded open up any of the OpenOffice tools (or even the main OpenOffice window), go to the Tools menu and click on the Extension Manager entry to open the Extension Manager tool.

Figure 1

From the Extension Manager window (see Figure 1) click the Add button and then navigate to where you saved the OpenCards extension file. Once you have found the file click the Open button to install the extension.

When OpenCards is installed it will be listed in the Extension Manager window and you will need to then restart OpenOffice to complete the installation.

Now fire up OpenOffice Impress and create a new presentation.

Presentation as flash card

Instead of spending too much time into creating a too-fancy presentation, here’s what you need to do. When you create a presentation you can use whatever style you want. But as far as the data is concerned you only need to bits:

• A title.
• A bullet point in the body.

Figure 2

OpenCards works like this: It will start a special slide show with your presentation. For this slide show it will present you the title of a slide (which will be in the form of a question or however you want to use your flash cards) and, when prompted, will present to you the answer.  Let me show you an example. After you have completed your presentation go to the OpenCards menu and select the Last Minute Learning entry. This will open up a smaller window and alter your presentation window to show the first slide as a flash card (see Figure 2). As you can see, the title of the card is the only portion presented to you. When you are ready to see the answer you just click the “Show Completed Card” in the smaller window. When you click that you will see the answer in the body of the slide and the smaller window will change asking if you remembered the card “Perfectly” or “Not at all”.  When you answer this question it will automatically go on to the next card. Repeat this until you have completed the rotation of the cards.

You will notice, once you have mastered all of the cards in your presentation, you can not start the presentation. In order to restart the presentation you have to click the Reset Learn-State button in the Last Minute Learning window.

Final thoughts

OpenCards also contains a Long-Term Learning feature which will be covered in another article (as it is far more complex than the Last Minute Learning). This extension is an outstanding means to learn facts for school, work, training, etc. If you’re looking for a free flash card solution that has the ability to retain your learning statistics, OpenCard is your tool.

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Impressive is a presentation software that provides the same presentation techniques that are known from PowerPoint with the difference that it can apply those to pdf documents and images. It offers links, overviews, page transition effects, highlights, spotlights and a sheet by sheet mode that can be controlled manually with the mouse buttons or automatically.

The portable software will extract a number of different files to the local computer system. Presentations can be started by dragging and dropping files onto the impressive.exe file in the program folder or by launching the tool from the command line. The basic command would be impressive file.pdf. More than a dozen command line parameters are available that can be used to control most aspects of the presentation software. Parameters exist to start the presentation in a custom resolution, a specific display ratio, to automatically flip pages after x seconds or to display a progress bar.

The primary application for this software is presentations. It can however be useful as a pdf reader as well especially for users who prefer to read page by page without scrolling.

There has not been any progress in development for the last six months which could mean that the project was temporarily or permanently halted. It does however work fine in its current stage but could use some usability additions like a graphical user interface to make things easier for the user.

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The presenter console displays the current slide, a smaller preview of the upcoming slide and a tool bar with navigational buttons and the current and elapsed time. There are additional options to display the notes of the current slide and view a slide overview which is also excellent for quick navigation.

The presenter console will automatically detect if more than one screen is available. Sun’s presenter console is able to detect the screen that is used for the presentation and will automatically display itself on the other display.

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Both functions can be triggered by pressing hotkeys, namely the combination [CTRL SHIFT 1] for zooming ing and [CTRL SHIFT 2] for drawing on the screen. It has to be noted that it is possible to draw on the screen after zooming in at least once without having to press the drawing hotkey first.

Both hotkeys can be changed in the program’s options. The only other parameters that can be changed in the options are to define a time in seconds after which drawings on the screen will disappear automatically and if the mouse cursor should be captured.

The software program uses less than 3 Megabytes while running on the computer system which together with its tiny size of just 76 Kilobytes makes it an ideal companion for a portable device or presentation disk. It is compatible with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and will probably also run on Windows Server and Windows 7.

DemoHelper is definitely not the first software program review of a software that helps spice up presentations. Other applications that offer similar features are Computer Whiteboard or Zoom It.

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The computer whiteboard software is unfortunately only available in German which should not be a huge problem as it is completely icon driven. The toolbar looks similar to image editor toolbars and should not pose a problem for none German speaking users.

The software will display a small window with a Start button after launch. Pressing the start button will activate the whiteboard mode on the computer. The computer screen is a full whiteboard from that moment on until the user presses the Fertig (Done) button.

The computer whiteboard software works flawlessly without lags or visual problems. It is compatible with Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista.

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The site makes creating a video presentation easily: to create one, all you must do is simply upload some pictures, or import them from a website, upload a song, or choose one from their, and finalise it. The presentation can then be shared or downloaded.

Whilst you may think you can do all of this in a desktop video editor such as Windows Movie Maker, animoto does it much quicker, has good production and analyses the sound and pictures and mixes them together to ensure they flow well. Humans have an input too; deciding the order in which to put the pictures, the ability to add text and ability to put more emphasis on particular images.

Slideshows speak better than words, so view mine of my holiday in Poland in 2007.

Unfortunately, animoto has some limitations.

In order to have higher-definition presentations or to make them last longer than 30 seconds, the user must pay. To remove the time limit, it’s either $3/video or $30/year and to allow them to be at DVD quality, you must pay $5/video. This may sound expensive, but in my opinion it’s worth it if you need to put on a good presentation. Only full-length videos (ie those you’ve paid $3 for) can be downloaded.

An application is also available for iPhones so you can view animoto presentations on them.

animoto allows presentations to be shared straight into most social networking sites like MySpace, Orkut and Facebook and images can be imported from Flickr, Smugmug, Facebook, Photobucket or Picasa.

(Thanks to Azhar Chougle for introducing me to animoto.)

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