First off, animations actually seem to work in Open Office 3.  Not like in Open Office 2 where they seemed to just randomly fire, or not, depending on sunspots.  Secondly, if you have, say, 27 pieces of text that you want to show up in sequence, all with a 1 second delay from the last one, you don’t actually have to set them all individually (like it seems you would need to do).

Click on the first animation, scroll down the list of animations, shift click on the last one.  While still holding down the shift key, double click on the last one.  A single dialog shows up that lets you set the animation firing characteristics.  That is actually changing it for all 27 of them.  It’s hard to believe this is how they meant that feature to be accessed, because it’s so obtuse, and you would only find it if you randomly like to click things like I apparently do.  Honestly, I expect I’ll be back reading this blog post as there is no way I’m going to remember this totally bizarre interface in a few weeks.

However it works, so no matter how random it is, I’m happy.