[plug] An OO question -- better answer

[William Kenworthy]

Unfortunately OO doesnt rule in this case.  From memory, in PPT its just
click a couple of checkboxes, in OO you have the choice of a number of
labour intensive, non-obvious, undocumented hacks to produce the same
thing ...

OO does have some real advantages in many things, and impress is
impressive, but PPT still has the edge, especially in ease of use.  I
use OO almost exclusively, but I have to deal with non-microsoft users
daily, and I think OO should put some work into the simple things that
help with user satisfaction - things like:

: the handout thing - its just so clumsy in comparison with PPT
: impress loses slide names on imported PPTs (I have a long running bug
in on this one, and after the effort I went to to convince the dev
involved that it was a bug, and the problem was in OO, not PPT - sending
file dumps showing the embedded data that OO loses etc - then to just
have it listed as "future" doesnt give one any confidence they are
listening to the user base.)
: calc having a 32000 row limit
: crappy macro language and macro documentation, tho thats improving all
the time.
: and my all time hate - the way the style function is implemented
: page numbering when you are trying to do simple things like turn off
the page number on the first page only.  This is tied up with style and
again is not an obvious way to do things.
: styles - they dont work reliably.  Click the wrong thing and some
(only some!) parts of a document will change.  Undo doesnt undo them,
you have to laboriously restyle it.

I sometimes still find myself wishing for wordperfect 5.1, it was easier
to get a well formatted document exactly how I wanted it 15 years ago
than today when I have to wrestle with OO's style function - MSword is
no better either.

I have used OO since StarOffice 4.0 days, and while its great its a very
long way from perfect ... and having to deal with MSoffice users all the
time, makes that clear!  The plus side is stability, builtin pdf export,
some functions that MSoffice doesnt have etc - its the ease of use part
that I keep running into.

BillK

On Sun, 2005-07-17 at 09:37 +0800, Leon Brooks wrote:
> On Friday 15 July 2005 16:33, W.Kenworthy wrote:
> > I created a single slide with the lines, then just copied it to every
> > second slide position.  Only took a few minutes (~89 slides), but
> > next time I'll macro it.  Not as neat as, or as low an overhead
> > solution as PPT uses, but its works.
> 
> Meh! You're all too used to only being able to do stuff in one hardwired 
> way. Waaaake uuuuuup! <slap> (-:
> 
> View => Workspace => Handout
> 
> Drag the pictures to where you want them to be on every page.
> 
> Click the text (T) icon on the toolbox, drag a suitable lined area, 
> release.
> 
> Click in the lined are, hit Tab.
> 
> Format => Paragraph => Tabs. Delete All. Choose a size to match the 
> ruler (in my case 9.2cm), an alignment (I chose Right) and dotting. 
> New. Close that.
> 
> Select all (Ctrl-A), Copy, right-arrow, pastety-paste-paste until the 
> lined area is the correct size.
> 
> Make sure "Handouts" are check/on in File => Print, Options. Print.
> 
> Done.
> 
> If you prefer, you can arrange the slides left-right-left. You can have 
> as many slides as you like on every page, plus decorations. There are 
> many other possibilities.
> 
> PowerPoint sucks. Impress Roolz<*>. Remember that. (-:
> 
> Cheers; Leon
> 
> 
> * except, AFAICT, for the matter of video clips; expect that to
>   be thoroughly cured sometime in v2.
> --
> http://cyberknights.com.au/     Modern tools; traditional dedication
> http://plug.linux.org.au/       Member, Perth Linux User Group
> http://slpwa.asn.au/            Member, Linux Professionals WA
> http://osia.net.au/             Member, Open Source Industry Australia
> http://linux.org.au/            Member, Linux Australia
> 
-- 
William Kenworthy <billk at iinet.net.au>
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