science degree using ubuntu open office

MS Ofice 2007 can read the open standard files now, check on the system which you will be running the presentation on has the file type listed in its openable types.

Which file type should I check? What is the code? Thanks for your help, Mara

There is no 'code'. You need to physically attend the Windows system you intend to view the slideshow on and see if the open slideshow file type is available

File -> open

drop down the file types to see if it is supported.

Hi :)

In OpenOffice click on

Tools - Options

Then down the left-hand side click on the little + beside "Load/Save". Now click on "General". Near the bottom of the page to the right are 2 drop-down menus. Please try to set-up these combinations

Text Document - Microsoft Word 97/200/Xp, this is 1 place backwards up the list

Spreadsheet - Microsoft Excel 97/200/Xp, this is 2 places backwards up the list

Presentation - Microsoft PowerPoint 97/200/Xp, this is 2 places backwards up the list

Note that you really need to avoid setting any of these to an option that has "template" in the title.

Now all your documents should look identical to those produced by MS Office users. Except that your's wont have tons of extra hidden garbage & possibly malware lurking in them :)

Ok, i think that setting the default file-types to MicroSquish Office standards might solve this and hopefully any other problems to do with sending people files.

I have heard from several lecturers and business people that they hate PowerPoint presentations. It seems that people focus far too much on whizzy flashy things, fancy graphics, too much writing & all appearing / disappearing tooo fast.

The real aim of a presentation is to engage the audiences attention and gain their interest. PowerPointers are unable to deal with audiences that are interested in things in "the wrong order" or to deal with questions as they arise.

The best public speakers avoid technology and just speak, pehaps using the old "tapping a spoon against a wine glass" trick to gain everyone's attention when they are ready to start speaking.

Fancy graphics are an instant fail because they draw people's attention away from what should be the main focus of attention, you. It is well worth role-playing it before hand with friends to get a rough idea of what stumbling blocks you might have to deal with.

I hope this helps!
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Mara?

Hi :) I feel we have been a bit mean & unhelpful to you so far! Usually i subscribe to OpenOffice questions because their team usually responds quite fast and gives very enlightening answers.

I think using "Save As ..." should allow you to save in those MicroSquish formats. With a lot of linux programs just typing in the extension yourself is enough to save the file in the correct format. In this case adding a ".ppt" to the end of the name as you save it should convert it into the right format.

Personally i prefer setting the defaults to do that automatically although some fairly staunch Windows users are beginning to use OpenOffice on their Windows systems too now. So i can occasionally use the safer native formats of OpenOffice but mostly it's just easier to stick to the unsafe formats that MicroSquish Office users can only use. Please let us know how it goes with setting those defaults!

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Hi,

Here are a few points that could be useful to know:

1) Can you connect your own computer (using Ubuntu) to the video projector for your presentation ? If yes, then you need to verify how to connect the cable from the computer VGA output to the video projector input port (that's pretty easy) and how to get the video signal from the computer to the video projector. This last operation could be a more little bit tricky: usually you have to press simultaneously two keyboard buttons, the first one usually "Fn" and the second, on the F1 to F12 row, has one or two screens figured on it, depending on the laptop brand and model. Thus, you need to switch on the video projector first, let it warm up a few seconds (before it start to search for any input signals) and then press the two requested keyboard buttons: Fn +F(?). Sometimes you need to press several times, until you can see the screen output displayed by the projector. The laptop screen can then go black so, to have both the screen displayed by the projector and by the laptop, you need to press the two keyboard buttons combination once again.

You need to verify that this works before doing your presentation, for instance during a coffe break or before the presentation session begins. It's better than to lose time and contenance with technical problems at the start of your own presentation.

2) If you are not allowed to connect your own computer, then you'll have to use the university's computer. If it is possible, you may ask them to install OpenOffice.org (for Windows) as it is a free program and can operate without problems along Microsoft Office or other commercial Office suites. If they are not willing to install any further programs, then you'll need to use their own presentation software.

If it is e.g. Powerpoint, then you may need to convert your ODP file into a PPT file (Powerpoint 2007 is able to open .ppt, no need to convert to pptx). Ther should be no major problems when converting from ODP to PPT because usually Impress has less possibilities than Powerpoint and thus less risks of having potential complex OOo formatting codes being ill translated into Powerpoint code. In the conversion process you should be aware of potential font rendering problems if you have not installed the Microsoft Truetype fonts on your Ubuntu computer. To insure a good inter-operability of documents betwwen GNU/Linux and Windows platforms, I always install these Microsoft fonts (you can find them in synaptic as a separate package which will help you to download and install them, or when installing the ubuntu-restricted-extras package which will install a bunch of softwares rather essentials, including these Microsoft fonts).

3) Doing a presentation work with Impress or with powerpoint is very similar (only Impress possibilities are more limited, I think, with regards to embed sounds and video files in the slides). So if you know how to make a presentation with Impress you also know how to do it with Powerpoint, and vice versa, although menus and layout of menus are not identical.

Hope that helps.

Hi :)

Vu Do Quynh makes excellent points

If you are going to use your own machine or install OpenOffice on their machine then it is worth trying to get that organised or test it out about a week before the presentation is due.

Alternatively, if presentations are going to be a regular feature of the course then be prepared to switch back to their systems quickly if yours haven't been able to be configured for that particular projector this time. Then hopefully everything should work properly next time.

For OpenOffice on Windows
http://download.openoffice.org/
on linux machines it probably shows the linux download but on Windows machines the same link will show Windows downloads. If this is the machine that your professor uses when marking your work then after you have installed OpenOffice to his machine you can revert your machine back to using the safer native OpenOffice formats. Everyone wins.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

H,i thanks for all your help! It's fantastic. I'm contacting the uni at the moment to see if they have open office, I'll see what they say. I'll play around with it and I'll stick with it if I can. These presentations are a requirement of my course. I'll only cross over to the dark side if I have too. It will take me a while to sort it out so I'll start a new thread if I'm needing more help before the next presentation.
Now I'm trying to work out how to make graphs!
Thanks heaps, I'll check this thread again to see if anyone else thought of anything,
Mara

Hi :)

Graphs are easiest in Calc (~ Excel, the spreadsheet program) about 7th button in on the top right, looks a bit like a frisbee with speech bubbles. Then export/import it into Impress?

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Hi :)

This probably is not very helpful right now but i noticed ActionParsnip posted this link in another thread and thought you might appreciate it too
http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/

Regards from
Tom :)

I'm thinking at this stage that I need to go onto windows and use all the programs that the uni is using. It seems too hard and I'm getting behind in study! Impress and calc for graphs is proving problematic and I'm only at the start! Oh well! Mara

Hi :)

Dual-boot so that you have both on your machine. Then you can use whichever is faster for you.

Bear in mind that Windows suffers slow-downs, anti-virus, defrags, inconvenient updates and its an incredible pain to re-install! If you don't still have Windows on your machine and haven't got MS Office on Cd then you would probably end up using OpenOffice on Windows anyway.

Also Linux has a LOT of stuff developed for/by university students and professors to make things easier. While you are only using stuff that Windows does have equivalents for there is a ton of stuff that you wont be able to even buy for Windows, even assuming unlimited cash.

Open Synaptic Package Manager and have a look at things like

lyx
latex-beamer
foiltex
jgraph
diploma
easychem
feynmf
lilypond

Also consider that Writer (unlike Word) can save your documents as ".pdf" so that your documents look a LOT more professional as they always print out exactly as you arranged. Word will often re-arrange stuff if you print from different machines or onto different printers so it always looks different and inevitably gives excess empty pages or 1 line that crept onto a new page.

Having got this far it seems tragic to turn around and go all the way back again. On the other hand this is always something you can return to and try again later on when everyone else has gained credit for their ground-breaking work.
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)