PowerPoint Numbering Off in OOI

[andrew bl]

Hi. I'm using Open Office 2.3. Just started today. My problem is that I have this PowerPoint file from work that I tried to open at home with Open Office Impress. Overall, I'm "impressed" with the quality. But there's this one slide where I have the automatic numbering format from PowerPoint, and it goes "1..2..3" but when I open it up with Open Office, the slide reads "2..3..4". The words are right, but it's just that my original line 1 has become a 2, and my original 2 has become a 3, and so forth.

If I play around with the slide in Open Office, I can get it formatted right, but I just don't want to worry in the future that Open Office will be unreliable in transferring numbered lists accurately.

Has anyone else encountered and overcome this problem? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[RonIA]

Sorry for your frustration. I don't know if we will ever see 100% compatibility with Microsoft's proprietary formats. You have to remember, Microsoft is really the only organization which truly understands what is in their formats (and there has been debate on that point). So OpenOffice.org developers have had to reverse engineer the formats to make them work in OpenOffice.org.

However, on a related note, if you have used MS Office products for a significant length of time you will note that even Microsoft Office, from version to version and even machine to machine sometimes does wacky things with files.

As with all things, if you are concerned about how something is going to appear in a finished product, you had best check it out just prior to presenting it. The list of people who have encountered strange behavior when trying to give a MS Powerpoint presentation is large.