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LibreOffice 4.0 releasedLibreOffice 4.0 releasedPosted Feb 8, 2013 13:11 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950)Parent article: LibreOffice 4.0 released
If interested in LibreOffice, recommend following the blog from Michael Meeks. See for instance this entry: http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2013-02-07.html
In that blog he links to the slides of his FOSDEM talk. I unfortunately did not attend that talk, but slides gives a good idea on what is happening behind the scenes at LibreOffice. It gives the impression that a huge amount of work is done by a large group of people.
Slides:
LibreOffice might not work nicely at the moment, but all this code maintenance hopefully will result in nice improvements in their applications. I use Microsoft Excel a lot and last time I looked, Calc is really lacking (features, keyboard shortcuts, etc).
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LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 14:03 UTC (Fri) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
> If interested in LibreOffice, recommend following the blog from Michael Meeks.
There is also http://planet.documentfoundation.org/, which includes that blog and many others (but if you follow the blog from Michael Meeks on it, always scroll to earlier dates a bit, since his posts sometimes seem to be backdated).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 16:22 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> LibreOffice might not work nicely at the moment, but all this code maintenance hopefully will result in nice improvements in their applications.
Given the ugliness of those slides, I can only hope you're right.
And the pointless attacks continue Posted Feb 8, 2013 18:13 UTC (Fri) by thumperward (guest, #34368) [Link]
This account, like the "Slashdot" one before it, does nothing but post negative and usually uninformed commentary on the work of others. Would it be too much to ask that it too be disabled?
Chris
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 18:54 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
Better to judge on substance than just solely on appearance.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 20:52 UTC (Fri) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link] For slides, appearance matters. It would be an excellent exercise for an LO developer to buy a copy of a modern text on best practices for slide-based communication (say, Presentation Zen) and try to create slides in that style using Impress. Even the most basic techniques recommended for making slides that are persuasive and informative are often somewhere between painful and impossible. (It isn't just slides; doing the basics recommended in Typography for Lawyers to make documents that look professional and are maximally readable has the same net result in Writer- somewhere between painful and impossible.)
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 23:18 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
I didn't find them that bad. In fact, I found them to be pretty good. There was a lot on each slide, but then the man clearly has a lot to say. Another thing is that the slides were probably designed to be useful as a standalone resource, so that in front of an audience they are there for reference but people are supposed to listen to the presenter and allow him to direct their attention to the more pertinent points.
I wasn't at any of the presentations where these slides were shown, so I can't say anything about the means of presenting them itself, but as a downloadable resource I found them informative. Certainly a lot more informative than slide decks consisting of 150 single-word slides ("performance", "fast", "cool", "shiny"...) where you really had to be there, and where even nice photographs would be more communicative to those who weren't or who downloaded the slides later to refresh their memory.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 9, 2013 3:16 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> I didn't find them that bad. In fact, I found them to be pretty good.
I just noticed that okular uses a very poor algorithm to scale the screenshots on those slides. When viewed with evince, they look a lot better.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 9, 2013 16:21 UTC (Sat) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
I noticed that it is rare to see that combined.
I often see various presentations. At most they are created by a small. What I noticed is that unless it is meant to be announced, there seems to be a difference in presentations. Some presentations look really smooth, but substance wise they are lacking (you cannot tell due the amount of time spend on the presentation). The presentation by Michael Meeks is more like what I value more: focussed on details, but the resulting presentation is not as smooth (things like different font sizes, too many colours, too much text, more difficult to follow structure, etc).
It does not really matter if there are lots of guidelines, templates, etc. Often the nicest looking presentations are lacking content wise.
It would be nicer though to have the combination of good content as well as really nice presentation. But if it is just one person, give me the inconsistent presentation any day over something smooth but lacking (if the presentation is smooth, make sure to be critical and ask loads of questions :P).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 9, 2013 17:54 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
The point is that a presentation program is supposed to make it easy to create good presentations, even for people who don't want to invest a huge amount of effort. That's the reason why many people like LaTeX so much: you can obtain a reasonable result without worrying a lot about layout. LibreOffice doesn't seem to do well in that regard.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 9, 2013 18:02 UTC (Sat) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
I find various things strange in your argument.
For one, I disagree with the purpose of a presentation program. Sometimes you just want speed. Secondly, if you see a presentation which does is not nice it does not imply that the presentation program was at fault. Lastly, I don't find LaTeX easy at all, though you didn't specifically suggested that as a good presentation program (right?).
Include a chart/graph/table from some other program in your presentation program and it is going to look out of place (different fonts style/size, it being a picture instead of vectors, etc). A program can also do so much.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 9, 2013 20:24 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> For one, I disagree with the purpose of a presentation program. Sometimes you just want speed.
So a presentation program is a tool to quickly create something that sucks? I'm not interested in such a tool.
> Lastly, I don't find LaTeX easy at all, though you didn't specifically suggested that as a good presentation program (right?).
> Include a chart/graph/table from some other program in your presentation program and it is going to look out of place (different fonts style/size, it being a picture instead of vectors, etc).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 11, 2013 19:20 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
> If your presentation program forces you to use raster graphics, then I suggest you use another one. LaTeX interoperates with a variety of vector formats such as SVG or PDF. Also some programs (such as Gnuplot or QtiPlot) allow you to export the graph in PGF/TikZ format, making integration with LaTeX trivial.
I had a paper to do for a class and I used circuitmacros[1] to convert from m4[2] to eps and embedded a our circuit diagram right into the PDF as a vector drawing. I'd like to see any presentation editor do that…
[1]There's some tedious work to get the wires laid out right, but once the shape is set, components can be moved around without an issue.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 11, 2013 20:46 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
We did something similar (with graphviz files) using VB macros back in 2001 (I think).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 14, 2013 23:28 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
People just don't spend time on presentations and things will go wrong.
If you copy/paste while creating presentation you'll end up with differences. Vector graphics is nice, but try getting that working nicely while copy/pasting from various programs.
E.g. creating a control chart in some program (forgot the name, need to check @ work). You can paste but by default it just pastes an image. Even as vector it'll look off: different fonts, colours, etc.
I don't really see a presentation program fixing arbitrary copy/paste things.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 11, 2013 23:19 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Seems like a faithful implementation of MS Office to me, then. :)
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 19, 2013 13:04 UTC (Tue) by ssam (subscriber, #46587) [Link]
if you want to use latex for presentation, but dont want to type so much, have a look at wiki2beamer.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 16:50 UTC (Sun) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]
I have been trained by professionals in how to make good slides, so at least I know a good one if I see it. I have to admit that within the free software world that training is sourly missing. Too often slides are filled with text as if the presentation itself is supposed to be documentation, speaker notes are often not distributed at all. Probably this is partly due to trying to make the slides meaningful to people who did not attend the presentation. However, I have never had any trouble with LO in that respect. I would rather say to the contrary, all the bling in powerpoint tends to lead to horrible presentations. Moreover there are several slides in Michael's presentation that are prime examples of excellent slides (while others are horrible). Exactly what problem do you have making good presentations with Impress?
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 23:43 UTC (Sun) by el_presidente (subscriber, #87621) [Link]
> Exactly what problem do you have making good presentations with Impress?
The lack of a guide on making good presentations?
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 23:59 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
>> Exactly what problem do you have making good presentations with Impress?
> The lack of a guide on making good presentations?
I think it's even more fundamental than that.
The lack of agreement on what makes a good presentation.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 11, 2013 0:38 UTC (Mon) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]
> The lack of agreement on what makes a good presentation.
Surely we can agree on that!
If you are depending on a tool to make a good presentation, then you are missing the point - and should probably stick to cat photos :-)
And if people come away from your presentation thinking that the slides were really good, then they probably were distracted by them and missed your point.
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