PowerPoint & OpenOffice Impress

[Arlin]

We use PPT for our presentation software.
Recently, we acquired a new volunteer (YAY!), BUT they are using Ubuntu with Open Office.
It has been a while since I looked at Open Office Impress, but the last time I did, it really did not meet my expectations compared to PowerPoint. Also, file translation between the two was not very good.
Has that changed at all?
Could this work?

[Dan Rector]

It can work, but its never going to be a perfect fit, 100% of the time. You can even have problems on two different systems with Powerpoint on them (fonts on one but not the other, slide timings, paths for embedded media, etc.)

I've experimented with Impress but was never completely satisfied if the final goal was Powerpoint. Probably the only way to guarantee that it will look the same is to export the Impress slides as graphics ( such as .jpg or .png) and then import that into powerpoint. It makes last minute edits a bit tougher, but you could still have the converted Impress file if you needed to change anything.

The only other thing I can think of is to run one of the Powerpoint viewers under emulation - either in a virtual machine or maybe Wine and see if the converted Impress file looks okay.

Dan

[stevek]

I'll second what Dan said. Converting from Impress to PowerPoint only works reliably for simple presentations. Still, if one of the media team wants to prepare something like the rolling announcements presentation at home in Impress, then open and touch it up in PowerPoint on the day, that can work OK.

We installed OpenOffice on the church computer too, but don't actively use it. Since Microsoft Office can't read OpenOffice documents, having OpenOffice installed is a reasonably way to can cope when someone outside the team brings a USB stick 1 minute before the service starts. (We've got that down to a rare occurrence now, but it can still happen!)

[Mustangnaz]

No, Impress is not a suitable alternative for creating or presenting. As Dan suggested, your volunteer needs to either emulate PowerPoint on his machine, or remote access the church machine.