OpenOffice.org continues to hate you

Inserting bullets into slides where previously there were none. Thanks OOo, reformating a number of slides was exactly what I was missing in my life.

Oh, and waiting an entire minute to save my presentation is also a great use of time. Funnily enough, my laptop disk (although slow) is faster than 1.3MB/minute.

5 thoughts on “OpenOffice.org continues to hate you

  1. Hi!

    ACK on that. Though, I spent a few hours this weekend updating the master layouts that I use for my presentations and actually ended up learning quite a bit about making the slide deck more usable… One thing I really do get annoyed by though is if you right-click on a slide in the left navigation area and scroll down the slides and click paste, then “After” the slide, it still inserts the darn slide back up where you originally copied it… very annoying.

  2. Hi Guys,

    Can I suggest that you look at your master slide view and fix that up maybe? By default the layout of the master slide view will be to have a heading and bulleted list, and this may be interfering in what Stewart is trying to do here.

    Also, for Jay’s problem – the reason it inserts the slide up where you copied is that is the slide that is still selected. You need to select the slide which it will go after before doing the paste.

    I agree that there can be some hiccups with getting OOo to work, but most of the time it is a matting of knowing how it works. Hope this helps!

  3. Jonathon,

    i do have the master slide like that – as I do (occationally) want that layout… But I also *often* want other layouts – something that seems impossible to accomplish easily (i want to add something to that layout thing at the right). grrr (again).

    But my main problem was having saved the document looking correct, later (on open) it looked wrong.

    Yet *another* thing in OOo I cannot trust to stay the same? I already don’t use *any* of the animation/reveal features because they’ve been horribly buggy and unusable (e.g. save, open, the order changes). Not sure how to get around these layout problems though…

  4. Jay – I know exactly what you mean. The way i deal with it now is to duplicate a slide, then go to slide sorter and move it around.

    for an indication on the size of the slide decks i deal with – my 35minute talk at MySQL UC2006 was 250 slides and a 3.9MB odp file.

    My tutorial for this years conference is *currently* a 1.3MB file with 500 or so slides. It will get bigger as it’s not near complete yet.

    I really miss the “sorting” of Keynote – the ability to have a hierachy of slides and collapse them (e.g. under topic points).

    In fact, I could probably currently justify the cost to the company of buying a Mac and Keynote just to do presentations quicker. However, I’m then into the non-free software category… which isn’t where I want to be. I feel being able to at the very least give the feedback to the OOo developers will help the free world.

  5. Well it does seem that the layouts are pretty absolute in definition. I cannot find a way of changing or adding to those directly at the moment, but will certainly let you know if I do find out.

    Also, for the hierarchy of slides, there is the outline view which allows this to small extent. The view you are talking about is done in a similar way for documents through the navigator and would most likely be implemented in the same place for Impress. There is no hierarchy there currently, but it could be a feature request being implement.

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