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The OpenOffice.org Impress presenter screen
While OpenOffice.org's Impress is a reasonable presentation program, it
lacks one often-requested feature: the provision of a separate screen for
the presenter which would contain notes, an indication of what the next
slide is, etc. So it is encouraging that the OOo developers have just announced
that this feature is now in development; see this
page for some description of how it is expected to work.
"Implementation of the Presenter Screen extension has begun and there
is an early extension that shows its basic capabilities. The look, layout,
and detailed behaviour of the controls, however, are far from final. This
is where you, dear reader, come into play. You can help us develop this
extension by giving feedback when you try out the developer snapshot, by
telling us what would help you most giving a presentation, or by joining us
in implementing it..."
(Log in to post comments)
The OpenOffice.org Impress presenter screen Posted Oct 31, 2007 15:08 UTC (Wed) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link] I would prefer another kind of notes. You know, those yellow ones you see in Word/Writer. And especially, separated or split notes view in a part of window, not as popups/tooltips. You know, like in MS Word 2000/2003. Once I took part in a translation project where this Word feature was used as a primary collaboration mechanism. And to my disappointment, OO Writer could not give me the same functionality in a convenient way - only those red dots and yellow popups. There is a wish in OOo BTS about this feature, with great number of votes, but OOo authors do not seem to hurry and implement it.
Notes2 Posted Oct 31, 2007 18:46 UTC (Wed) by sybille (guest, #47093) [Link] Actually, a fair amount of work has been done on the new Notes implementation for OOo Writer, Notes2. It was a Summer of Code project this year and a first release is expected to be included in OOo 2.4.
Notes2 Posted Oct 31, 2007 20:31 UTC (Wed) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link] Thank you for the info. Right after posting my comment, I went to serach about current OO notes status and found about Notes2 for myself. Great news, will wait impatiently for OOo 2.4.
The OpenOffice.org Impress presenter screen Posted Oct 31, 2007 16:03 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] It really does show two screens if your laptop handles that, but the second one is just the normal composition screen, not anything useful.
The OpenOffice.org Impress presenter screen Posted Oct 31, 2007 16:30 UTC (Wed) by danielpf (subscriber, #4723) [Link]
In my opinion the most missing feature of Impress is the possibility to
include and play videos out of the box. Animated gifs work but are
rapidly heavy.
Dan
Limitations of OOo Posted Oct 31, 2007 19:57 UTC (Wed) by morhippo (subscriber, #334) [Link] Why I am forced to use MS crapware in the office: Impress is not usable for modern presentations in its current form. I tried to insert a background MP3 (or WAV) file into a presentation. This works with a few tricks. However, no format I saved or exported the presentation in had the music file included. The presentation only played the MP3 as a file on the file-system of the computer I work with, but did not insert it into the ODF file, which should be trivial - it's a zip container! How am I supposed to send this presentation via email? Writer does not understand the multi-level automatic numbering I use in contractual agreements. These are doc files from third parties and unless I see the automatic numbering levels without fiddling, I cannot use OOwriter to even read or edit any legal document. Both short-comings have been reported by me as a bug two years ago, nothing has happened. For a professional office worker in today's business environment, OOo is not practically usable. Too bad.
Limitations of OOo Posted Nov 2, 2007 5:51 UTC (Fri) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link] That would seem like some areas I would like to explore. Could you please provide the links to the relevant bugzilla entries?
Limitations of OOo Posted Nov 2, 2007 12:41 UTC (Fri) by morhippo (subscriber, #334) [Link] I do not find my original issue reports (hate the interface) Sound being lost on save to PPT or SWF or HTML http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=81799 I would like to add in impress' own format as well. For some word import/export numbering bugs please refer to http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=56053 http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=31463 http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=27459 http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=70271 I think the numbering bug that is most often biting me is referred to in this report: http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=67302
Limitations of OOo Posted Nov 4, 2007 20:56 UTC (Sun) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link] OK, thanks for the links.
Not Impressed Posted Nov 1, 2007 3:12 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] I give a lot of presentations using Impress. The feature is welcome. I hope they get the case of a 16:9 PC presenting to a 4:3 projector (and vice-versa) right: presenters usually don't get to choose the projector. Also useful would be a set of test screens which would allow the native resolution of the projector to be quickly identified. Also very useful would be the display of notes on the PC screen whilst projecting the slide, this would save me from printing my presentation notes (because presenters don't read what is on the slide, as the slide's job it to augment the spoken word). My over-riding complaint with Impress is that it is written by people who have used PowerPoint, not by people who give presentations. There are just so many mis-features and so many missing features. The way to add a background bitmap to a master slide is just odd and impossible to find. Master slides themselves lack flexibility. Why can't I define my own slide type with my own text box names -- apparently heading slides don't need subtitles or dates. Why can't I have a running header giving some context, let alone a slide counter like Keynote? Why can't I have a list which is automatically split across multiple slides with the heading automatically repeated. The saving grace is the ability of an external extension to import SVG. This makes high quality graphics available, useful for both graphs and for clip art: the creation of both is a nightmare in OOo itself (thank you Gnumeric, Inkscape and Dia). It would be nicer if that extension didn't mangle the size and colour of imported text. I also have the same complaint of Calc's graphs: they are not written by or for people who use graphs. Compare Gnumeric and Calc. Gnumeric has real, reliable graphs which reflect the content. Calc is primarily about the glitz of the graph. That's fine is you are selling widgets, but fatal for the science and engineering of widgets. Copying PowerPoint for presentations and Excel for graphs is dumb. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board dammed PowerPoint for all but marketing presentations, and you won't find a single statistician saying anything nice about Excel's graphs.
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