The intentions of this short tutorial are not to teach you how to use Open Office, but rather to show you a quick and dirty way to create presentations and tutorials that can be exported as a Macromedai Flash file.

What is Open Office? It is a free, open source, cross platform office suite that has a lot of the same features as popular commercial suites.

Being that it's cross platform means it can be compiled for just about anything, Windows, Linux / Unix, Mac, etc..

Using Open Office Presentation -

Basically, if you've ever used Microsoft Powerpoint, you've pretty much used Presentation. It's a slide show (or presentation) creator that lets you create any style slide show you want.

You can have text, graphics, charts, etc... or any combination

It does not take much to figure out Presentation. You can add text or picture boxes, add designs, add tables and pretty much anything you can think of.

After you have created the presentation, here's where you convert it to Flash:

You simply go in to the 'file' menu and select 'Export'.

A 'save as' dialog box will come up where you can choose the file name, location and the format you want.

From the pull down box you will see the 'Macromedia Flash (SWF)' option, that's the one you want.

Select the format, pick your location, name the file and press the Save button.

That's it.. you now have a Macromedia Flash version of your presentation that you can include on your website.

Why whould you want this?

Macromedia Flash is pretty much a standard for multimedia on the web, as a result there is a plug-in for almost every browser and most people already have this plug-in.

This gives you the chance to put Flash content on your site without having to play for the Macromedia Suite.

About the Author

Steve Howson is the Webmaster for SG Network Technologies web hosting company.
http://www.sgnettech.com