Yesterday Sergio, a user of OpenOffice Impress, sent to the OpenOffice.org discussion list his list of the “Major Gaps of OpenOffice Impress 3.3 vs. Microsoft Office PowerPoint”.
Sergio compiled the list because, as much as he likes OpenOffice, “after struggling for over 1 year, sadly he had to stop using Open Office Impress and go back to Microsoft Power Point”.
Personally, I have experienced and can confirm most of what Sergio lists as “File Processing issues”. I haven’t encountered the other problems, but that may be because I use Impress very little these days, and I only need it for very simple slideshows. I don’t even know yet, for lack of personal experience, if and how the current LibreOffice version of Impress would be different. However, I am very curious to know if such differences exists. Above all, since I strongly support the OpenDocument format used by OpenOffice, LibreOffice and many other software programs, I want these issues to be solved.
Therefore, after speaking with Sergio, I’ve reformatted his report and put it here where it’s easier to find it than as a mailing list attachment, and easier to comment without subscribing to a mailing list. Your feedback is welcome!
Impress File Processing issues
- Slow speed of processing even with high efficiency PCs (major problem !): Many tasks are performed very very slow !
- Cutting slides: very, very slow
- Copying and pasting slides from one impress file to another: very, very slow
- Acquiring a slide change, even in the text: quite slow
- Saving files: very slow
- Opening files: very slow
Copy and past slides from one impress file to another
When a graphic is present in the slide layout, it gets deleted when the slide is pasted and copied in the destination file (major problem).
the color format of the slide in the source file gets changed when the slides gets pasted in the destination file (In PowerPoint, when you paste the slide in the destination file you are asked whether to retain the original format, including colours, layout graphic, etc.)
Changing page (slide) (to the following or to the previous one) in normal view
In “normal” view, it is not possible to shift easily to one page to the following or the previous one, using for instance the side scroll bar or the mouse scroll wheel. This is possible only when the zoom size of the page/slide very small, not with operative size. You have to necessarily click on the new slide into the left frame with the miniatures slides. This is very cumbersome.
Icons view
It is not possible to view all the icons of the formatting toolbar, unless you set a very large window size. Please allow to arrange the toolbar in 2 lines, even when it is integrated in the menù bar.
Please allow to change the order of icons within a toolbar.
Formatting in OpenOffice.org Impress
Bulleted list: I can’t set easily and automatically a space or a tab between each bullet and the first character of the paragraph (this option is present in “Open Office ” Word)
Increase or decrease indent of a paragraph or a bulletted list: I can’t let the icon left-to-right or right-to-left appear in the Formatting Toolbar, and therefore it is difficult to increase or decrease the indent (this option is present in OpenOffice Word)
Multiple selection of non-consecutive text: it is not possible, within the text in a same text cell, to select multiple, non-consecutive words or sentences or different non-consecutive sentences of a bulletted list (these options are possible in Open Office Word using “CTRL”),
Similarly, within a table, it is not possible to select multiple, non consecutive words, or sentences or cells (this is possible in Open Office Word using “CTRL”).
Formatting multiple text cells at the same time: after you select multiple text cells, the tool bar “Formatting” disappears. Therefore, you have to go to the Edit toolbar or right click and make one change at a time in the text format, which is very time-consuming.
Formatting tables: there is no way to select a column or a line just putting the cursor at the top of the column or before the line.
Changing the column width: putting the cursor onto one column border (starting from the second column from the left), clicking and dragging it in order to enlarge or reduce the column width: there is no way to retain the original width of the side columns (this is partly possible in Open Office Word by clicking at the same time the CTRL).
When the file is saved and re-opened, especially when an Impress file is saved as Microsoft PowerPoint and then re-opened as Impress file, tables gets often increased in line-spacing (very difficult to reduce back) and, consequently, in the overall height, so that they often get outside the slide (major problem!)
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I agree that there are significant deficiencies when comparing Impress with Powerpoint. It has not stopped me using Impress for several reasons though, none of them to doo with fact that it is open source and free.
Firstly, I know it keeps getting better, and part of the driving force is that people who use report problems to developers and developers maintain an interest in fixing these based on this kind of feedback. I used to have difficulty getting graphs created in Open Office, ported into Impress, then transformed into powerpoint (for public distribution) difficulty, degrading at each step. This has seemed to be less and less of a problem since I have started using it.
Secondly it has facilities that is not (at least obvious to me) present in Powerpoint. For example creating a flash file from the presentation. simple and easy now to port a presentation into a website without resorting to HTML…although it appears this too is possible in Impress and Powerpoint.
Thirdly I keep discovering things I did not know I could do…making my experience rewarding. the inclusion of extension make this even better.
Don’t give up on Impress..just continue using it and deliver praise for its success and constructive criticism for its “deiciencies” to the developers….they are doing a great job
I use Impress almost everyday for quite complex presentations. I am satisfied with the speed and also with most other features. Indeed, some actions are slower compared to Powerpoint, but the developers are aware of it. LibreOffice Impress has got several improvements in 3.4.1 in terms of speed, default settings and usability (most actually were actually imported from the development stream of OpenOffice.org 3.4). In other words, Impress keeps improving and I do not see any real reason to switch to Powerpoint. Speed is not a big issue, but certainly can be improved. I am currently only annoyed by the Undo/Redo-bug: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36138. Also, I appreciate the developments regarding an addition of SmartArt features in the future.
I also see main advantages of Impress over Powerpoint: SVG-import, hyphenation, flash-export, good html-export (since last version), great PDF-export, beautiful and useful presenter screen, 3D-transitions in Linux, better formatting abilities for text and drawing…
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Well, our corporate powerpoints don’t translate well, but they use multiple graphical features and transforms. I don’t like them, they are all distraction and no content. I once counted 180 words on a slide, only 4 of which were relevant to the topic or different from the last one.
I think that pp/impress is the weakest compatibility item in the suite, apart from the lack of anything to match LookOut (Hurrah. I hate it.)
In fact I don’t like PP/impress type presentations at all. They are dull and force a style of thinking alien to what I am trying to get across. I’d rather talk for 15 minutes, write things I say or people ask on a white board, and show a couple of 2 minute videos.
I don’t like PP/impress type presentations at all. They are dull and force a style of thinking alien to what I am trying to get across
Bob,
I know what you mean, I feel the same sometimes. However, I think such presentations have a reason to exist if you conceive them as an assistant to what you do “live”, and write them as a way for participants to refresh their memory about the main points after the slideshow, when they go back home.
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My biggest issue with Impress (and to a lesser extent calc) is lack of compatibility with powerpoint (or Excel, in calc’s case). By this I mean that unlike writer, when I create a document in Impress and try opening it in powerpoint, my formatting is almost always screwed up enough to make using the program useless. This is important to me as when I move from location to location I don’t always have the same office suite. The same thing happens with Calc, though not as much. The only Libreoffice program that at this time, IMHO is solid and reliable almost all the time, is Writer.
This is interesting. I have had problems when saving in .ppt format from older versions of OpenOffice and then reopening the file with PowerPoint, but all I experienced was (in some cases) justification of paragraphs and font kerning not perfectly preserved. What did happen to you to make “using the program useless”?
things like backgrounds that were visible in PP completely disappear in Impress (all in ppt format); or font formatting that was completely different in Impress. My biggest issue was consistency. a small hic-up here and there is one thing, but major changes to the document means that for me, i have to stick to a single program. That said, I do jump from word to Writer and back all the time, with no ill effect.
I have seen bitmap graphics get distorted badly. I also have headers and footer type information lost. Also the templates do not translate either…very little comes across.
I have given up on Impress almost entirely as I need to collaborate with MS Office using co-workers. I have to say that it is terribly disappointing whenever I see a set of release notes (http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/3.5#LibreOffice_3.5_changes) and do not see anything about addressing the huge interoperability issues with MS Office.
If Libre Office want to succeed, these must be addressed.
I have long been of the opinion that PowerPoint is an application that has no reason to exist. Anything I needed to do in a presentation, I could do as well or better in HTML or XML or SVG. The approach of HTML5 surely makes this even more true. So any shortcomings in Impress are likewise a non-issue.
I agree the world might be a better place without powerpoint, impress etc. but the hard truth is that many organisations disagree and furthermore won’t accept any tool which doesn’t produce Windows compatible results. If open source wants to win, it has to play nicely with Skype, Excel, Powerpoint, Word, NTFS etc. Just how the world is, ask the guy who had to throw his Betamax away ….
The single biggest problem is the ability to create a final ppt presentation that you can present reliably or give to someone else to integrate into their presentation. Typically it is things like drawings and equations that are big issues. In anycase, there is always something — so you end up exporting to ppt and fixing the issues manually in PowerPoint. I work for a large company — and presentations are always thrown together at the last minute, typically a group effort people sending things around — and the final presentations are expected to be given in power point — and your typically using some other persons computer so you don’t have access to OO. The amount of blow-back you get for the ppt crowd is huge if you don’t use ppt in this environment plus the time constraints are huge issues.
I’ve tried alternatives — but they mostly don’t work easily or give good results. You can use a portable OO and put it on a usb stick. Problem with that — to slow and typically ppt is open and full of presentations and presentation computer is out of memory. Takes 5 minutes to open a presentation in this case — which is a problem for a 7 minute presentation.
People say — convert to flash, or html, or image, … All of these have issues. Flash at least on my version does not work — can only go forward for example. All the others including Flash — you loose resolution. Only OOo export that works well is PDF. One option that does work is to export to PDF, and you can present if the target computer has a PDF viewer — all of my companies do. Problem with this — you get a “hand” for a cursor not a pointer or other tool. So still not very good. PDF fine for small groups but not for high visibility presentations.
My opinion — what OO needs is two things. 1) a small footprint portable viewer that does not take 5 minutes to load on a usb stick and uses minimal memory, 2) a way to convert to a static PPT — one with minimal features — such as by exporting to PDF, then a feature that can import a PDF and convert it to a static PPT. By static I mean — just convert the PDF to high resolution images and paste them into a PPT. Any other option that creates a simple enough PPT so that it ALWAYS works is OK too — but I don’t know of any easy way to do this at the moment. The problem now is that OO tries to export complex graphics data — and that typically has at least one issue in say a 30 minute presentation (20-30 slides).
I agree with people that this gets better and better — but the nature of presentations — high visibility, rapid turnaround, group effort, and unknown target computer make the use of Impress the most difficult of all of the OOo components.
I’ve seen people say — these issues are similar for converence presentations as well — I’ve not tried that — but I can imagine the same thing applies.
After struggling with OOo since v2.3 two of the non profit organizations I support threw in the towel and switched to the MS product.
OOo generally worked well for them on a day to day basis but fell apart when dealing with outside entities where either OOo would badly reformat a master document / presentation or the document was messed up at the other end.
The only reasons for sticking with OOo was a) the cost saving and b) the ability of OOo to create a presentation handout view where the slide sizes could be scaled on the handout to make them more readable. The latter was extremely important to them as they put on conferences and have to include copies of the slides as part of the conference handout material. They would spend days and days getting speaker presentations (in ppt) and reformatting them in impress then generate the handouts 6 to a page. Unfortunately in version 3 that feature was removed. To overcome this I installed 2.4 on a machine and the cleaned up presentations were moved to that machine in order to create scalable handouts.
They finally decided that all this effort wasn’t worth saving a few bucks.
Other customers I support have their own problems with calc and have a copy or two of the MS product in order to see the spreadsheets being sent to them.
I understand that a lot has to do with the obfuscation being done by u-know-who but if the OOo team wants their product to be taken seriously they absolutely have to address the document compatibility issues.
Frank,
if people really want to own their own documents they absolutely have to address the fact that continuing to save them in secret, deliberately obfuscated and incompatible formats doesn’t make any sense
Marco
I absolutely agree with you but when most of the world uses that OTHER software it’s hard to convince users of the fact. I’ve had numerous discussions with users about just that and invariably the response I get is something like “I don’t care, I just want what works for me and my contacts”.
How do you argue that statement?
We’re not the leader here, we’re playing catch up so we have to have a darned good ‘solution’ if we want significant market share. Notice the quotes around solution. A darned good program isn’t necessarily a darned good solution if the person using it doesn’t recognize it as such. Most users in business just want to get their work done as quickly as possible with the least mount of problems or effort.
If my two non-profit customers wouldn’t have had to be constantly reformatting their documents and dealing with complaints from their board and other outside entities they’d still be using OOo.
Which leaves that OTHER company laughing all the way to the bank.
““I don’t care, I just want what works for me and my contacts”. How do you argue that statement?”
Actually, I don’t really argue with that. I accept that sometimes there are no real alternatives. If someone really has no other alternatives, that’s very often their own fault.
Please don’t take it personally, but what I cannot accept is only things like confusion between software and formats, or statements like “if the OOo team wants their product to be taken seriously they absolutely have to address the document compatibility issues”. The OOo team CANNOT address the document compatibility issue by engineering. It doesn’t make any sense at all to ask THEM to solve that problem. It is completely out of their control. It is a battle that is guaranteed to be impossible to win by engineering. It’s like if oil companies changed gasoline formulas every other month for the only reason to burn the engines of certain brands of cars, and drivers complained with the car makers because they don’t build “compatible” cars.
So if you tell me that life doesn’t let you and your customers use OpenDocument (with OOo or any other suite, that’s irrelevant) that’s absolutely OK with me, I’m not going to blame you for this. But at least let’s make sure that as many people as possible understand what is really happening and what the real cause is. If somebody can’t use OOo and OpenDocument in public context it is not OOo’s fault. It is only because governments don’t mandate that only open file formats can be used in such contexts (or at least that they cannot be refused) and the general public still knows so little about computing to understand what’s happening
Talking about compatible formats, what about writing a PPT in one version of Ms Office and trying to view / edit it in another version ? IME this workflow works well if the destination version is more recent than the source one, but what if the conference PC has, say, office 2000 and you’ve written a wonderful PPT in Office 2010 with all the new bells and whistles ?
So while it’s understandable and also actually useful that people point out deficiencies in OOo / LibO, either their own ones or versus Ms file formats / programs, let’s try to be fair. It seems to me people used to Ms products have a tendency to treat OOo / LibO as the newcomer that has to be 250% featureful and bugless, whereas Ms Office’s bugs or shortcomings are just seen as fact of life and don’t genereate much complaint.
In answer to the original post, see: http://openoffice.org/projects/www/lists/users/archive/2011-07/message/56
@ marco
Ya, that ‘taken seriously’ was over the top and I’m glad you called me on it. What I was trying to say if they wanted ‘serious market share’. But you also make an excellent point about always playing catch up and never actually hitting the constantly moving and changing target. Sort of like the silverlight / moonlight products except there MS is purportedly helping and not hindering.
@Marcello
Also an excellent point but I find that when that happens invariably the person with the older release (the offending party) is admonished (jeered, bullied, put down, …) about not using the ‘latest and greatest’ and should immediately upgrade. It’s both laughable and sad at the same time.
It’s always easier when you’re then incumbent isn’t it?
I use OpenOffice because it is not from Microsoft!
First of all I love and support “OOo”. I use Writer all the time, BUT…I am struggling with IMPRESS. In PPT you have the “Presenter Tools”, and I could not find the same feature in IMPRESS. Not in “Help” or on OpenOffice website as well.
Sadly I can not afford to buy Microsoft Office for all the machines, so I use to write the presentation on the only one Office:Mac version-machine, and just played on Impress windows PC machines. And here the problem it comes: in Impress I can not enjoy the different display on “presenter” and different on “audience” screen (projector).
An other hand is not comfortable either when I want to write the text on the slides (not just import different files), it is not that easy and natural like in Power Point.
These tasks are not very complicated ones, I am wondering, why is suffering a lack of these the IMPRESS.
Thank you.
Hi Peter,
I Understand your frustration. Thanks for your comment, I created this page just to collect in one piece all information of this kind. However, the most efficient way to get a detailed answer to your specific questions is probably to post them to the Libre Office mailing list.
I temporarily wanted to delete two slides out of a presentation on Open Office Impress. So I cut them then made some changes, converted the file to pdf (without saving the Impress file) I tried to undo everything and its stuck at one step before I cut those slides. Are they gone for good? Please let me know if there is anyway, I could retrieve those slides.
You know how some softwares like Corel Draw have a list of items on a copy/cut panel. You can insert them into your main file whenever you wish. I want to know if there is any such place where my cut slides can be retrieved from. I am too scared to close the file because I might loose those slides forever.
Any suggestions are welcome.
Thank you for your time.