LibreOffice Impress

LibreOffice Impress is the presentation application in the LibreOffice suite from The Document Foundation in Berlin, released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, installs locally, and costs nothing — no subscription, no account, no seat count.

It reads and writes .pptx alongside OpenDocument, and the authoring set is complete for ordinary work: master slides that carry title and outline formatting down to every slide using them, an animation pane with per-object effects and trigger order, slide transitions with variants, object interactions, speaker notes, handouts, rehearse timings and an outline view. Delivery is handled by a built-in Presenter Console, which puts the current slide, the next slide, the notes and a timer on your screen while the audience sees the deck.

Three things PowerPoint charges for have no counterpart here. Morph, the transition that animates an object between two slides, is an OOXML extension Microsoft gates behind a Microsoft 365 subscription and Impress does not implement at all. Designer, which generates layout suggestions as you type, is subscriber-only and absent. So is cameo, the live camera feed placed on a slide.

Three more are free in PowerPoint and still missing. There is no live co-authoring on the desktop — Collabora Online Impress puts the same engine in a browser if that is what you need. There is no official mobile editor; Impress Remote is a phone clicker, not an app for making slides. And there is no rehearsal coach beyond timing yourself.

Round-trip fidelity on .pptx is the trade-off that shows up most often, and it shows up more than it does in documents, because a deck is a visual artifact handed to someone else to present. Fonts, master-layout inheritance and animations are where differences appear.

The Document Foundation is the German charitable foundation behind LibreOffice. Its imprint names the entity at Winterfeldtstraße 52, 10781 Berlin and states its legal form outright — a “gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts”, a charitable foundation with legal capacity under German civil law — with VAT number DE 295589870 and supervision by the Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Justiz und Verbraucherschutz, Stiftungsaufsicht. A German Stiftung has no shareholders and no members who own it, so there is no parent to chase and no cap table to flip.

The Document Foundation is the German charitable foundation behind LibreOffice. Its imprint names the entity at Winterfeldtstraße 52, 10781 Berlin and states its legal form outright — a “gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts”, a charitable foundation with legal capacity under German civil law — with VAT number DE 295589870 and supervision by the Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Justiz und Verbraucherschutz, Stiftungsaufsicht.

The legal form settles the ownership question rather than merely answering it. A German Stiftung has no shareholders and no members who own it, so there is no parent to chase and no cap table to flip. The board of directors is elected from the project’s own contributors, and the foundation is funded by donations and corporate sponsorship rather than equity.

It was founded in 2010 when the OpenOffice.org community left Oracle, and it also hosts the Document Liberation Project, which builds converters out of proprietary file formats into ODF. LibreOffice itself ships under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and is free in both senses; several companies, Collabora among them, sell support and derived products built on the same codebase.