Is Open Office Impress better than 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.

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.

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.