Impress needs serious bug fixes - Windows & MS format saving

[jdonner]

This is incredibly frustrating, and something that I can't believe is a program which has been amazingly promising, is ultimately a big disappointment.

OO is not new. OO has been tested and vetted for several years, and yet there are a very obvious series of bugs that still exist.

I'm not looking for help. I'm only reporting the bugs I've found, and hopefully someone who knows what's what will look into it. This is the first time I have used Impress for a major project (more than a slide or two), and it has taken me all day to fix and refix the same problems again and again, just to compensate for how the program is incorrectly saving/converting my project file into a finished presentation.

Platform: Windows XP (several systems)
Save format: MS PPT 97/2000/XP
OO version: 2.4.1
Viewer: MS Office 2003 PPT viewer
Presentation uses minimal graphics and no special fonts (arial only)

Bug report:

Primany complaint: When saving in M$ format, the presentation loses certain formatting, seemingly at random.

1. Bullets - The bullets change format and often disappear, sometimes changing from graphical bullets to plain bullet points. Even when using the same graphical bullets from slide to slide, the output file displays different bullets on different slides (sometimes graphic, sometimes not). It doesn't change them from one graphic to another, but if it keeps the graphical bullet at all, it often changes to the graphic's default size.

2. Graphics position - Imported bitmap graphics change to the default center of the slide, randomly from save to save. I save several versions, keeping my old work files and saving a new file as I make changes. Even when no changes have been made to a graphic, work file #3 and work file #7 will have that graphic in totally different positions.

3. Ditto for text blocks. They seem to reset to a default centered location, randomly. Other times, they change to another "default" position entirely... the position of the first text block on the first slide.

4. Text and paragraph formatting - Paragraphs seem to lose their indentations, and text is sometimes changed from all bold to all not bold, depending on the paragraph. If one word in the sentence is bolded, sometimes the whole sentence ends up bolded. Again, this is random from save to save.

5. Animations - The animations set for some objects change from being triggered by "After previous" to "Click," again, differently and randomly per version. Even when the animation has been reset to "after previous," it often reverts to "click." Slide to slide transition animations are unaffected.

6. Text characters - As stated above, I'm not using any weird fonts, just Arial (this is a boring business presentation for a non-profit group). I have noticed that strange "return" characters often appear after a parenthesis at the end of a line, even if I've gone in and deleted from the character to the end of the line and retyped the character. This happens almost every time there is a parenthesis at the end of a line with a hard line break after it.

Solutions: None, really.

This is not a complicated presentation, nothing very fancy, just fading in/fading out elements and minimal graphics. But I have had to repeatedly go back into the project file and fix these problems, trying to find a compromise to get a decent presentation out of this program. I have found that when working backward, from the last slide to the first, many of the fixes "stick," and are saved successfully in the output. Inevitably, though, there are other problems, so I have to go back into the project file, and start from the end, and re-fix all the stuff I've done in the previous save, plus fix the new problems. I have not yet been able to eliminate all of them, however. After fixing a dozen problems, five more will pop up or other previously fixed ones will revert to their pre-fixed state again. With a presentation of 35 slides, it's just not worth it.

This program is not ready for real world use yet. From a business perspective, it's still better to spend the money on one good copy of M$ than to have a free program that doesn't work right and costs you two days of productivity. The realily of business is that M$ is dominant, nothing we can do about it. People want their PPT presentations in M$ format so that they can be shared and used by many associates (who almost always use Window$). Any program that professes to be an Office competitor/replacement should have its act together when loading or saving with M$ formats.

On a related note, since OO (inexplicably!!?) doesn't come with its own viewer in which to preview Impress files or view the published output, I have to use (guess what?) the free M$ PP viewer to see it. This viewer, you may guess, only shows M$ PPT formatted files. So, if people who use Impress have to use M$ to view the files, and therefore have to publish the project in M$ format, WHY hasn't anyone discovered the bugs I have been wrestling with and fixed them? I have a hard time believing that with this many bugs popping up that no one else has run into them before, and an even harder time understanding why they haven't been addressed. I even tried using the program with the same project on two other systems, and lo and behold, the same bugs arose. I know the source code for the M$ PPT file format is not publically available, but it can't be that hard to imitate or duplicate, can it?

Sorry, though I love open source and am a big supporter of Linux, this program (like Linux in general) is just not ready to compete... only on price, not on features or usability. With all the talented people in the os community, I can't believe that either these problems hadn't been discovered before, or that they are unfixable. Come on, people, you can do better. You could wipe the floor with M$ if programs like OO would only exibit the quality they boast.

Disappointed, angry, frustrated... but hopeful. I will check back with OO in a few years. Don't bother flaming me, I'm not coming back to read the posts.

Jay

[acknak]

Why would you expect to be flamed for complaining?

We accept complaints here, as long as you realize it's not a very effective use of your time, or ours, because there's absolutely nothing we can do about it: there's no one here other than users like yourself. The only purpose of this forum is to help people use OOo, as it is, warts and all. We can't change what it is.

And the core of your complaint is absolutely true: Impress is loaded with bugs in it's basic features. I'd have a hard time calling it anything more than alpha-quality.

But, even so, it's still good enough for many people's use.

I think you've made one basic assumption that's causing most of your issues: depending on perfect file compatibility with Powerpoint.

You seem to expect Impress to save perfectly to a foreign, undocumented, binary file format (.ppt). It just isn't going to happen. Yes, it works fairly well, and it could and should be better, but it can never be perfect. If perfect file exchange with Powerpoint is an absolute requirement for your project, then I agree with you: Impress is a waste of time, and I've dumped it myself under those circumstances.

When I need to save to a format that I can confidently show on another computer, I either stick to ODF (.odp) and take OOo (and all my fonts) with me on a CD or memory stick, or I use PDF. Most (all?) PDF readers have a full-screen slideshow mode that's adequate and very reliable, although you do lose animations. And PDF is far more appropriate for sharing with other people.

[Phil]

I admit PowerPoint is probably the most buggy of all OOo applications. Also antialasing of graphics is quite bad, although there have been advances in version 2.4 and 3.0.
Also compatibility to the PowerPoint format is far beyond being ideal, but I have faced far less compatibility issues to the .ppt format than you did, Jay.

Like acknak, I do not understand why you are working with .ppt files. If you want to give your presentation, you can use OOo. No need to have OOo installed on the target PC, simply use the portable version and put it on a USB memory stick or CD/DVD including your presentation. If you need to share the presentation with the audience, give them a PDF file, which is advantageous anyway.
Giving the presentation with full screen PDF display is a very good option too. This is an especially stable and reliable way, and PDF files also support slide transitions.
If you want to hold a more sophisticated presentation based on PDF files, use KeyJnote. This is a very powerful tool. See the thread http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/ ... php?t=4984 where we have discussed it in some detail.

As you do, I hope Impress will be improved, and indeed a lot of bugs should be fixed in the upcoming version 3.0. For example, version 3.0 will feature native tables (see OpenOffice.org 3.0's new features, an early look), which I rate as a very important improvement.

Best regards,
phil

[Emprovision]

Yes. I have had the same problem. While Impress is fine for the average PowerPointer, it has severe limitations, which I, as a newcomer to Open Office, am irked by. The problem is, it seems to save as a mix of PowerPoint 2000 and 2002, which disables my work. If you don't see what I mean, check out PowerPoint Heaven at http://pptheaven.mvps.org . I am a member of the discussion board there (under the same name), and my works are quite similar to those featured on the site. It is impossible to make or edit such PowerPoints on Impress.

Along with all the errors mentioned above, Impress destroys transparencies from PowerPoint, is more difficult to create and edit graphcs with, and won't save some of its fill efects and other graphical features in PowerPoint format, which renders Impress completely useless for my purposes.

... Perhaps I should help make an effort to increase similarities with PowerPoint (after all, I am almost a pro on PowerPoint), without infringing copyrights.

These complaints are perfectly fine to say; it shows what Impress needs to complete in order to catch up witht the leader in presentations, PowerPoint, No-one should be flamed for their noble efforts such as the ones seen above. Please don't leave, jdonner!

Good day, everyone!

[Phil]

The underlying problem is, as mentioned by acknak, that the MS Office file formats were closed until lately. Therefore import and export filters have been implemented by reverse engineering. This is the cause why flaws in the compatibility to MS Office files remain.
It works better for MS Word files (.doc) than for PowerPoint files. I suppose this is due to the higher importance of a text processor compared to a presentation software.

In any case, I expect a considerable improvement what concerns interoperability between OpenOffice and MS Office in the near future:

• Microsoft will support Open Document Format (ODF)
  I admit that there is no guarantee that this will work well, but at least it is a reason to hope (see also the interesting thread Say NO to the new MS Office OOXML format as ISO standard)
• OpenOffice 3.0 will support the new MS Office XML file formats (.docx, .xlsx, etc.) that were introduced in MS Office 2007. There is also an add-on for MS Office 2003 that supports these new file formats (called "Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats").
  So my hope is that these formats will offer better interoperability.

Another thing that comes to my mind is the Sun ODF Plugin which allows users of MS Office to work with ODF files already now.
Has anybody got experience how well that works? Maybe interoperability is better than if using the MS Office binary formats?

Regards, phil

[Cambirder]

To criticise a program purely on the grounds of its compatibility with power point is being somewhat harsh, after all is you apply the same logic in reverse PP is totally useless.

As has already been pointed out, if you are creating presentations alone you don't need to convert them, and if you are collaborating on them you really should to be using the same program (although in an ideal world this should not be the case).

[Emprovision]

To criticise a program purely on the grounds of its compatibility with power point is being somewhat harsh, after all is you apply the same logic in reverse PP is totally useless.

As has already been pointed out, if you are creating presentations alone you don't need to convert them, and if you are collaborating on them you really should to be using the same program (although in an ideal world this should not be the case).

You have a point, but it cannot be very well applied to the real world. If you think about it, hte majority of presentation-creators use PowerPoint, and to have somebody download will OpenOffice.org or download the add-on for Office just to view your presentation is absolutely horrible for your presentation, because few people will actually bother to download something to view a solitary presentation, which destroys your popularity. It would be much better to share a presentation by converting from one program to another, but this is made very difficult for advanced users creating objects with good graphics and/or custom animation/triggers by the lack of compatibility between Impress and PowerPoint. Microsoft doesn't even have to create a format that's compatible with Impress because of PowerPoint's popularity and domination over the electronic presentation market, so this becomes the job of OpenOffice.org developers. But then again, I guess Impress cannot be judged so harshly because it's free project including anyone from amateurs to professions, most of whom have never met or consulted each other, which is quite different than the production of PowerPoint at Microsoft. I am hoping OpenOffice.org will improve its compatibility over time, because that is the major flaw in Impress, which explains why many more use PowerPoint rather than Impress.