Still working on my slides for SCALE, decided to further delay productivity by putting together a brief set of steps on how to use OpenOffice.org Impress to get *really* pissed off.
# Start up OOo Impress and create a new presentation.
# Open up the master slide view and create two new masters; make them somewhat visually distinct so that its easy to experience the pure frustration later.
# Return to the slide view and make sure you can see the Master Pages area of the Tasks page; note that both your master slides are listed as “used in this presentation”, but not “available for use”.
# Click the first master, which should re-apply the master to the slide you’re looking at.
# Click the second master to apply it to the slide.
# *Note that the first master has now disappeared.*
# Think to yourself, “well surely it’s not gone and return to the master view.
# Realize that no, the slide really has disappeared.
Is it any surprise that you see a proliferation of Macs and Keynote at tech conferences, that people think slide-ware generally sucks, or that people still equate PowerPoint with presentations?
I _think_ this is the same as Issue #43354, reported in *February, 2005*. Sigh.
Lately I’ve been very partial to using LaTeX Beamer (http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/) for all my presentations. Very easy to write with LaTeX, plus it produces beautiful presentations with basically no worrying about the design. Maybe not exactly for every situation, but I find it highly useful.
Nathan, I’d recommend to use S5 by Eric Meyer[1]. It’s basically XHTML with CSS. If you know how to create webpages you also know how to create a presentation.
Add in some spice like jQuery for transitions if you want and you’ve just got the best cross-platform FLOSS geek presentation tool. Oh and putting stuff online is a breeze as you’ve already created the html :) Btw there are already some other people enhancing Eric’s version[2].
ps: printing is a matter of making sure to add the right css file.
1: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
2: http://s5project.org/
I hate to warm up an old thread, but I just published what might be the answer to some of your problems. The product is called “JessyInk”. It’s a small JavaScript that can be embedded into an Inkscape SVG image and turns every layer into a slide, when the image is loaded in a browser. It supports transitions, effects and auto-texts (e.g. slide numbers). Additionally I integrated an index view mode, to jump to particular slides. Essentially, you can edit the presentation in Inkscape and then play it in any SVG capable browser.
The website is http://code.google.com/p/jessyink/
Have fun playing!
Hannes