The most important part of any presentation should happen before you even begin building your slides. The most important part of a successful presentation is having a good message or story to tell.

The first step is to organize your thoughts. Once you know what you want to say, then you can decide how to use Impress as a tool to communicate your ideas.

Next, create an outline. You can do this however you like. You can use a word processor, paper and pencil or the outline view in Impress. We'll cover how to use the outline view a bit later.

The important thing is to know what you want to say and how you're going to say it before you start drawing slides.

Building thumbnail sketches

The next step is to break your outline into slides. For complex concepts, or if you want to illustrate your ideas with graphics, it's a good idea to mock up your ideas on paper or build thumbnail sketches.

This approach will save you lots of time because it's faster to brainstorm and improve your ideas on paper than on the computer.

We worked out our ideas by drawing thumbnails, changing them and tweaking them until we felt they would communicate our ideas effectively.These preliminary drawings let us work through our ideas and improve them. When we're done the thumbnail drawing will be our blueprint.

When we're finished, the final slide will look like this.

This slide makes it easy to understand what we are trying to say, and it is much more interesting for the audience that pages and pages of text trying to explain the same thing.

So let’s get started.