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Yes, "Impress" is the word. Though it made a massive leap from the 0.90 that was frankly unusable to being apparently useful in 2.0 it has a few, er, rough edges. OpenOffice's crash recovery feature is put to good use on my Ubuntu Edgy installation as complex actions, such as entering text will cause it to poo itself regularly. Impress's files are significantly smaller than those produced by Powerpoint! A recent presentation was 4Mb in the MS format, and only 27Kb in OpenOffice! An incredible saving! Achieved by the clever expedient of simply not bundling extraneous information like images into the presentation. This clever default didn't quite work for me, as I was in the rather unusual situation of preparing a presentation on one computer and presenting on another (silly of me really). Of course, rather than storing confusing relative filenames, OOo had hard coded the links to the full path. It's a shame that my Windows machine at work doesn't like /home/hakim as a path. No matter. I simply unzipped the .odp file, ran a search and replace on the file path, and rezipped. The resulting file was corrupt and didn't open, but thoughtfully not putting this option in the GUI gives so much more possibility for powerful manipulation. As I was running out of time, I went through every slide and reinserted the copy of the image from my windows machine. This worked just fine. Except when I saved and Impress decided that I must have still wanted the unix path and reverted the changes. Google showed me that images could be inserted as links or as embedded. I checked, and "link" was unticked, implying that it *should* be embedded. Just for a laugh, I inserted a single image with "link" ticked and saved. This time it accepted the file path and the image was still there when I reopened. Woot! So, I got to enjoy mindless pointing and clicking, save the file, and then Export it to PDF, because even OOo isn't clever enough to fuck up a PDF file. Yet. I've checked, and there isn't any obvious context-menu option to change whether one/all images should be linked/embedded. I now want to take some changes I made at work and edit them on my laptop, so at this point I'm taking a simple expedient. I'm saving the document as a Powerpoint .ppt... I am tired of being repeatedly fucked on by OpenOffice. It is now in Version 2.0., but is still unstable and broken. Using OpenOffice makes me want to pay several hundred pounds for CrossOver and an MS Office license, and very few things make me want to spend my own money on software. in hate, osfameron
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