Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

I have an OpenOffice complaint. I’m starting to use it, and so far so good. It nicely opens all my legacy (by legacy I mean Microsoft) files, and all is good.

I’ve always thought Powerpoint was one of the most usable pieces of software I’ve ever seen. This doesn’t get said enough - it’s usability is undoubtably partly responsible for its success (which results in, yes, corrupting the minds of everyone who uses it. I know.)

For those of you who are not familiar with it, Powerpoint provides an editable outline view at the left, together with an editable slide view at the right and a notes view below that. Whatever you edit in one of the views updates simultaneously in the other.

For some reason, OpenOffice decided to throw out this innovation. Maybe it’s been patented? Anyways, in OpenOffice, you get an editable outline view, but no simultaneously editable slide view, nor a notes view. Which really spoils it for me, I’ve been trying to start a presentation and I just can’t do it.

Unless I’ve missed some setting somewhere, in which case please let me know.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 22nd, 2004 at 6:21 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.