Open Office®

Open Office is a suite of open source programs that competes with Microsoft Office. You can download the programs for free at Openoffice.org. That’s especially helpful if you don’t have PowerPoint, but need a program with the features and flexibility that it has. You can open our templates in Impress, which is the presentation maker in Open Office. It has most of the features of PowerPoint, although you’ll need to hunt around within the program to find them.  As you would expect, everything is in a different place!

Rest assured we can print your poster from Open Office just as we do from PowerPoint. By the way, each program will open the file format of the other.  The limited testing that we have done between the two programs to see whether they faithfully open the files of the other show that things do jump around a bit, as things do between versions of PowerPoint (and especially across platforms).  Proof carefully if you are going between programs!

If you or one of your collaborators are using Impress, we suggest you use our collaboration rules for designing a poster. The good news is that Impress has a decent pdf maker, as do the latest two versions of PowerPoint.  Sending pdf’s out for comment is the best way to be sure everyone is looking at the same thing on their screen.