Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 42864
Request: Stand-alone Impress Viewer
Last modified: 2007-06-28 13:24:00 UTC
Dear Developers! My name is Gábor Iglói. I'm a medical doctor in Hungary. I'm fond of opensource software and using OpenOffice.org for 1,5 years now. I like it very much actually I have written all of my important documents using this suite including my graduate essay. I follow the ongoing development of the OpenOffice.org 2.0 and I find it very promising. I have welcomed that the insertion of movie clips in Impress presentations has been developed. In fact, in the academic world it is very important to create and perform nice presentations for education. Unfortunately in this world M$ software has the monopoly - you just can't replace the PowerPoint because everyone uses it so when you bring your CD to anywhere you must supply your presentation in PowerPoint format. With Impress you can produce quality presentations but you can't transfer it to congresses. Even if you export it to ppt format there are some incompatibilities. And until now you could embed very limited video clips in your Impress presentations. I've also read about and searched for OpenOffice Viewer tools. I've read about developers' opinions about this topic: too much effort to create a stuff like that for all platforms, instead OO.o gives good support for HTLM, PDF or Flash export... This way it will be hard to give the academic world a working option for migration. You can't reproduce all effects of an Impress presentation in these formats and you can't embed movie clips either. I would suggest that maybe it would be a very good idea and this could make OO.o even more popular if you would create an Impress Viewer. You wouldn't need to support all platforms and all OpenOffice components because 1. Unix/Linux users have already installed OpenOffice/StarOffice on their machines - this is the ultimate office suite for *nix users (I'm in this group too:) - so they don't need a viewer app 2. OO.o Writer documents can be exported to PDF quite well so everybody can handle them - so a Writer Viewer wouldn't be so important (and OO.o has good support for the DOC format) 3. You would develop an Impress Viewer for only the MS Windows platform, because other platforms' users probably has and use OpenOffice.org already. That's why I think a standalone Impress Viewer is the most lacked component of OO.o. With the availability of a small standalone, installable or simply executable official Impress Viewer for Windows we could conquer the academic and perhaps the business scene. Thank you reading my letter, Gábor Iglói, M.D.
Reassigned.
I can only support Gabors view : I'm also working in an academic environment and the situation is exactly the same as Gabor describes it : in conferences one usually windows, very rarely Macintosh computer is used with PowerPoint, so every body has to bring his presentation in this format. I actually prefer Impress as I can work more easily and it has possibilities that PowerPoint does not have. Thus saving under PowerPoint is no use because then I loose these possibilities/options again .... or have importation problems. Thus, even I as open source freak use still PowerPoint. If a Windows based Viewer would exist, it would be much easier to convince colleagues to use OO. Thanks for considering this enhancement Oliver
why not install openoffice.org suite instead of a viewer? both are free.
Because you cannot arrive at a conference with a 80MB installation and insist to install this on the computer used for the presentations, only to be able to show your OOo Impress presentation. However you can do this with either a standalone .exe presentation or a small , viewer-only programm that does not need a installation procedure but only a doubleclick on the .exe file to start a presentation. And which can similarly rapidly be deleted afterwards. In the moment, at least in the life sciences area that I know well, conferences and seminars are based on Windows Powerpoint presentations, mosltly for compatibility reasons. Already Powerpoint on MacIntosh systems give problems and are thus avoided. In my opinion, as long as OOo does not have a simple-to-install standalon viewer or the possibility to create from any presentation a standalone-presentation (with the choices of including linked files, true type fonts, a viewer, etc). By the way, Powerpoint does all of this and the installation takes only about 5MB (excluding the presentation file), all DLL within the same folder, so with one click you can delete all of this again. I can only stress again that in my opinion in life sciences OOo could have alot more more success if you could produce a standalone presentation. I prefer creating my presentations using OOo, however I do it never for conferences and seminars where I cannot use my own laptop, as I do not want to be embarrased with a presentation that has format and action problems. Bonne fêtes Oliver
Changed Summary text and subcomponent, to better reflect the nature of this Issue. Being an academic myself I appreciate the request, but think it would be more useful to enhance the current export features. For example, improving the Flash (.swf) export would ensure the file would run on most computers, or at least only require installing the tiny Flash player. This approach minimizes development effort. Also see the request for a Writer Viewer, raised in Issue 2762. Regards, Andrew.
*** Issue 62120 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
I hope it's ok to comment on this issue. There two work arounds that I know of for this issue: 1) You can nicely publish an Impress presentation into PDF format and use Acrobat Reader on any platform for view the show. Each slide becomes a page and you can easily move between them. You do lose transitions and sounds, but works great. 2) http://portableapps.com/apps/office/suites/portable_openoffice allows you to run OpenOffice from a USB device like a thumbdrive and take the whole thing with you and just plug it right into a laptop. Regards!
cc
Some more comments from the practical side : - Export to pdf : Adobe Reader has a nice full screen mode, however animations won't work , and therefore I can't see how the pdf format can be used for academic presentations; it's the animations that make OOPresentation or Powerpoint powerful compared to other grafik progammes, that could theoretically also be used to create presentations. - Export to shockwave flash : similarly in the moment animations don't work, however with shockwave this problem might be overcome. On the other hand, at least when using Internet Browsers to do the viewing, there is no complete full screen mode. I have tested Mozilla and IE and both still show a naviagion bar in the full screen mode. For official conferences this is rather disturbing. Would it be possible to have OO create afile that includes the presentation as well as a shockwave player? The problem is that OOo has some very nice options that are not available in Powerpoint (at least the versions I know of). If you would like to use these options, you need to use OO, especially as export to swf or pdf are even more limiting as the export to ppt. It's frustrating to have the nice options and not to be able to use them .....
I'm attaching GFlashPlayer which I don't believe is shipped by Macromedia anymore. It's a standalone flash player for Linux and has full screen support. Possibly it will be of use to someone, we use it here to push out documentation and help 'movies' to our users.
Created attachment 34490 [details] Stand Alone Flash Player, Linux
Now we have OOo 2.0.3, but still no plans for an Impress Viewer ?
Possible duplicates issue 26977: [RFE] Need self-contained executable slideshow issue 31107: Executable export
Seems to be dup of http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=22147. Resolving as such. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 22147 ***
and closing. Please transfer your votes to 22147.