Hi all, Some comments in line.
[snip!] > > > > > Impress as a presentation creator. (My main annoyance in OO) > > The one area where this is program is lacking is in animation. > > While most of the useful animations from PowerPoint are there, > > the actual interface is very out-dated (equivalent PowerPoint 97 > > and earlier). This area needs focusing on to catch up with MS as > > the best presentation software. > > > > A major advantage of PowerPoint is that you can open an "advanced > > timeline" and drag animations start and finish times around in a > > GUI form rather than having to tediuosly and time consumingly > > input every single value into a new window. PowerPoint also > > allows users to change the speed of a group of selected > > animations in one click from the top, OO does not allow this. > > > > Finally animations should be able to be copy/pasted to make an > > object do something more than once. > > > > If you could try to bring this area into line with PP2007 it > > would really make OOImpress the best presentation creator! I haven't had the chance to try PP2007 but I worked a lot with MSO 2003 and in my opinion OOo is a much better presentation creator. Firstly OOo is not a MSO clone, so we don't add things simply > because MS does. > Secondly I personally would object strongly to using developer time > on this because it simply leads to bad practice in creating > presentations. > > > Animations are one of the main advantages to presentations as > > opposed to overhead transparencies. Please could you do something > > about the current outdated and very user-unfriendly interface for > > animations at the moment. These ideas are PowerPoint standard and > > I believe they should be in OpenOffice too. > > In fact animations are nothing more than a toy. Reduce them as much > as possible. Slide transitions should be the same right through a > presentation so that your audience doesn't have to adjust to every > different reveal. Your message is the important thing, anything > that distracts from that is waste. I use nothing more than > "reveal" for text within a slide and maybe "wipe" for transitions, > anything more that is a distraction. I think I agree with Mark on the last two points although I have sympathy for what Graham says. OOo should not be a clone of MSO, but should implement functionalities that people find useful. Like Graham I tend to use animations very sparingly and I agree that steal take time that should be used instead to work on the actual contents. On the other hand, a) this is just my style; b) I have come across presentations where the animations were instrumental to understanding the slide. In my opinion the areas that need improvement are: 1) capability of adding animations to the slide master (e.g. to make the bullet points of a text box appear one by one 2) (similar to 1) ability of copying/pasting the animations 3) have at least a rudimental control on the timing of an animation. 4) better manipulation of multimedia 4) have a full timeline for animations Note on point 3). At present you can only specify slow/medium/fast, however if you import a presentation made with MS PowerPoint the timing of effects is preserved, therefore it is probably just a matter of enabling the GUI. Note on point 4) maybe this capability exists already, but I haven't still managed to install jmf on my Ubuntu box :-) > > > Has anyone requested these features before? Can you give me an > > idea on the likelihood of them being implemented? > > Have a search on issue tracker, I would suspect there probably is. > Unfortunately the likliehood is probably quite high. There is an issue on the animation timing which I raised (username: michelezarri) which includes an example of custom. If I find 5 minutes I will post the link.
