I am currently preparing to give a talk at the Ohio LinuxFest on September 29, 2012.  I was thrilled to be invited!  I’ll be talking about Amahi - Powerful, Simple, Home Server.

I have played with several different presentation programs.  I was most familiar with Power Point and have been impressed with the ease of use of Keynote in both desktop and mobile versions.  However, since this was a Linux conference, I committed myself to using LibreOffice Impress.

As I wrapped up the creation of my presentation and started rehearsing my talk, I found myself wanting a notes view.  This is a view that gives the presenter a view that includes notes, a timer, a clock and sometimes a view of the current and next slides.  I had found this in PowerPoint and found the notes view in Keynote presenter remote on my iPhone to be really convenient.

Creating slides in Impress was much the same as in PowerPoint and Keynote.  However I had a very difficult time finding the notes view for LibreOffice. 

Here is my solution:

1 - Download the Presenter Console Extension

Many sites instructed me to download the Presenter Console Extension and then enable it in Libre Office.  I could not find the extension at the LibreOffice extension site.  It turns out that the extension is still an Oracle product.  If you aren’t familiar with the split from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, you can read about it here. Long story short - the download link above takes you to the Oracle site, not LibreOffice. 

2 - Enable the extension in LibreOffice

From the top toolbar: [Tools > Extension manager]

3 - Use Multiple Screens

If you are practicing your presentation using only your computer, you will not be able to see the presenter console.  You need to have a second monitor connected to your computer and enable that monitor as a second screen (NOT mirrored displays).