This is the best we can do?

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.

1. Start up OOo Impress and create a new presentation.
2. 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.
3. 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”.
4. Click the first master, which should re-apply the master to the slide you’re looking at.
5. Click the second master to apply it to the slide.
6. Note that the first master has now disappeared.
7. Think to yourself, “well surely it’s not gone and return to the master view.
8. 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.