Computerized Presentation Formats

[evac-q8r]

What's going on?

I have to make a presentation to a company on a project that I'm working on. I have never done this and therefore somewhat confused as to how to prepare my presentation. What makes matters worse is that I don't have my own laptop. Should I use PDF and Acrobat or Powerpoint. What are some of the Linux alternatives.

Thanks for any advice.

EVAC

[AdamZ]

OpenOffice Impress works a lot like powerpoint apparently.

[evac-q8r]

Can PowerPoint presentations work in Open Office Impress and vice versa?

EVAC

[psych-major]

Originally posted by evac-q8r
Can PowerPoint presentations work in Open Office Impress and vice versa?

EVAC

Yes, but with severe limitations i.e. a lot of the eye candy inserted by M$ doesn't make it to OpenOffice.

But if you create it on OpenOffice, it should be OK in PowerPoint.

IMHO PowerPoint is one of the very few M$ apps actually worth its salt; you can do some pretty neat things with it.

[hop-frog]

I created a presentation in Impress, saved it to disk as as *.ppt, and had no difficulty running it on a computer running PowerPoint with a projector. My presentation used a lot of graphics and a few bullet points on each slide.

Avoid gradient and transparency effects. They do not transfer quite right over to PowerPoint. I completely avoided animation effects (because they are annoying), so I am not sure how well they transfer.

If you do not have access to a Windows machine to test your file before the presentation, you can download a free program called PowerPoint Viewer, from Microsoft (1 (http://www.microsoft.com/)). This is easy to setup and runs very nicely under Linux in WINE (2 (http://www.winehq.org/)). In fact, after I ran the exe file that installs the viewer, SuSE automatically created a shortcut in the KDE menu to access it.

[je_fro]

I use OO.o Impress --> ppt all the time.
just don't do anything really fancy and you'll be fine for sure.

[Parcival]

I do my slides in Openoffice Impress and always export them as PDFs - just be sure to toggle on the print quality and not the screen quality, otherwise JPGs in your presentation are going to look reeeeally bad. This way you can carry your PDF anywhere and run it on any computer with a PDF viewer supporting full screen view.

In my eyes, a good presentation needs a clean design, animations only to direct the audience's attention on something very important (i.e. use it sparsely so the effect doesn't wear off), and a maximum of five key elements (be it pictures, items in a bulleted list, etc.) on each slide.

[evac-q8r]

Nice input there towards the end psych-major, je_fro, and hop-frog.:D :D :D I had no idea that you can effectively create Powerpoint slides in OpenOffice. That's a great thing to know. Do the various fonts transfer over nicely or are they substituted if not available? Also, what is the percentage of companies using Microsoft having a PDF Viewer such as Acrobat on their systems just in case I choose to use a PDF file.

Oh, here's something else. How do you advance through the slides when making the presentation. To my knowledge there isn't any sort of remote control device. Using a mouse seems very tacky if thats how it's done.

By the way, great presentation tips Parcival. When the time comes I'll ask more about importing pictures into my presentation.

Thanks fellas,

EVAC

[Parcival]

Originally posted by evac-q8r
Do the various fonts transfer over nicely or are they substituted if not available?

In PDF, yes, in Powerpoint, no, so they're being substituted in this case. However, in terms of readability I recommend using standard fonts like Arial, Univers, and other sansserifs.

Also, what is the percentage of companies using Microsoft having a PDF Viewer such as Acrobat on their systems just in case I choose to use a PDF file.

It's a long time since I have met a computer without Acrobat Reader or the like. A computer with Acrobat 5.0 or higher is save to go. At university I usually put the PDFs on the class' website - this way the students can download the slides early and take notes plus I have my stuff ready whereever the class takes place. :D

Oh, here's something else. How do you advance through the slides when making the presentation. To my knowledge there isn't any sort of remote control device. Using a mouse seems very tacky if thats how it's done.

Either by a mouse or the keyboard. On the keyboard you can use either the arrow keys or page up/down. Esc normally stops the presentation.

By the way, great presentation tips Parcival.

Thanks for the compliment, and I sure hope they serve you well as I study perception psychology. ;) Once I was at a presentation by a doctor in linguistics and she had just pasted the whole text she was going to read to us onto two slides. :rolleyes: Her slides were as useless as content of her speech. :D

[rocketpcguy]

one thing i hate about impress compared to powerpoint is that in powerpoint you can quicky skim through the presentation in windowed mode (non fullscreen) with the mouse scroll wheel.
in impress, you either run the presentation fullscreen (slow with animation) or painfully click through the bottom slides-names.

is there another way of doing this?

[hop-frog]

To be on the safe side, save a copy of the presentation in both PDF and PowerPoint.

As for fonts, you can get official MS TrueType fonts here (http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/) and they work in OpenOffice. SUSE even has a script run from YaST2 Online Update that downloads and installs these fonts.

If you do not have SUSE or another RPM based distribution to install these fonts, just type 'cabextract arial32.exe' to convert the *.exe files into *.ttf format. Most, if not all of these fonts are found on every Windows machine in existance.

[Parcival]

Originally posted by rocketpcguy
is there another way of doing this?

Page Up/Down in windowed mode. :)

[je_fro]

I've never had any trouble with fonts using an Impress presentation made here at home, converted to a ppt and taken to school. But just to be safe I open it about an hour before the presentation starts. All I use are the bitstream vera serif font and greek symbols, and I've never had any trouble. Last time, however, someone had to run and fix their presentation (broken images) because it was made in Office 2003, and the laptop hooked to the projector was running Office 2000. Planned obsolescence, I say. Time to pay your master.

[evac-q8r]

I want to put in several figures in my presentation. With general figures there is normally white rectangular background with the figure inside of that. Integrates well into paper documents with white pages. However a presentation say with a gradient background of some color this would not necessarily look as good. So how do you superimpose an image so that the white background portion naturally becomes like the background gradient style of the presentation. Do I need to use gimp and cut out the important parts of the image?

Thanks

EVAC

[bwkaz]

Hmm... Make them .png images with alpha'd (aka partially or fully transparent) backgrounds maybe? I would think Impress would handle that, though I've never tried it.

[Parcival]

I'm not sure if I understand your question correctly, so I'm gonna give two answers:

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If your question is about a fframe in Powerpoint/Impress you would like to come with a transparent background, then fire up its properties and set it to no color.
If your question is about the background of an image file you are going to import into one of these programs, then yes, you have to use the Gimp, use the alpha transparency and save it as a gif/png. However, with this method you won't get 100% transparent backgrounds, the areas of the presentation with the transparency usually show up a little lighter.
[/list=1]