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View Full Version : Word is to Abiword as Excel is to Gnumeric as PowerPoint is to



devondashla
June 27th, 2010, 01:59 AM
I am not a big fan of OpenOffice, and I've been looking for a PowerPoint replacement candidate.

I have heard of Agnubis and Criawips, but apparently the first hasn't been active lately, and the second is immature. Then again, this is coming from Wikipedia. So, What do you use?

d3v1150m471c
June 27th, 2010, 02:01 AM
in the army we equated powerpoint with death

ubunterooster
June 27th, 2010, 02:11 AM
I have OOo Impress listed; I don't like OOo either

Edit see also: http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Linux_software_equivalent_to_Windows_software

jetsam
June 27th, 2010, 02:19 AM
in the army we equated powerpoint with death

lol. I've seen Power-point criticized, but not quite so severely...

I'm not a "user" myself, but I've downloaded lots of lecture slides. Usually they're done in Open Offics Impress or they're in PDF format. I think Okular has a pretty good presentation mode, so provided you don't need animation, that might work... You could make the .pdfs in Abiword or even Scribus, or use LyX if you have equations and what not...

Inkscape might be worth looking into if you like digging into hairy details. The .svg format is getting pretty fully featured, but I'm not sure there's a good presenter package for delivering a lecture.

devondashla
June 27th, 2010, 02:24 AM
I have OOo Impress listed; I don't like OOo either

Edit see also: http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Linux_software_equivalent_to_Windows_software

Yes, but is there still hope for either of the GNOME Office Presentation apps of having a future? I'm trying to stay away from OOo as much as I can, just because it has many flaws I don't want to have to deal with. I mean, I'll use it if it's the only decent one out there, but surely there must be others?

ubunterooster
June 27th, 2010, 02:44 AM
Yes, but is there still hope for either of the GNOME Office Presentation apps of having a future? I'm trying to stay away from OOo as much as I can, just because it has many flaws I don't want to have to deal with. I mean, I'll use it if it's the only decent one out there, but surely there must be others?
Also from the posted link above: KPresenter (http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/KPresenter)

devondashla
June 27th, 2010, 02:46 AM
Also from the posted link above: KPresenter (http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/KPresenter)

Gaaah. Sorry if you use KDE, but, I'm not fond of KDE apps in GNOME. Kinda messes everything up.

Hmm. In the mean time, I'm just going to stick to OOImpress. Maybe someone with more technical ability than me will read this and be inspired. (Did that sound as corny as I thought?)

ubunterooster
June 27th, 2010, 02:55 AM
I dislike KDE apps also...

You could try using Scribus...not really meant for this but it kind of works similar

siimo
June 27th, 2010, 04:17 AM
Just use office web its free. http://office.live.com

devondashla
June 27th, 2010, 04:36 AM
Just use office web its free. http://office.live.com

Free as in beer maybe, if it's coming from Microsoft...I've realized using closed-source ANYTHING is always a step in the wrong direction.

Legendary_Bibo
June 27th, 2010, 04:56 AM
What's so bad about Open Office?

Mr. Picklesworth
June 27th, 2010, 05:02 AM
This has been an ugly hole for a while. Miraculously, we have not just one but TWO solutions coming down the tubes!

Still early, but the first one is Ease: http://live.gnome.org/Ease

And the other one is Glide: http://blogs.gnome.org/racarr/2010/04/20/introducing-glide-presentations-for-gnome/

And they both work better than OpenOffice Present, even in their current pre-release states. I say this with absolute confidence without needing to test whether they actually build at the moment ;)

While you wait, consider presenting with a whiteboard. Slideshows have become so cliché at this point that I find hand-written ones way more memorable. Even if it's all written in one colour with no transitions.
(I'm not jealous of Keynote (http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/). Honest!)

devondashla
June 27th, 2010, 05:47 AM
What's so bad about Open Office?

It doesn't use GTK (I know, a small factor, but I'm superficial with this. KILL ME.), It's interface is a lil clunky, and quite honestly it just doesn't get the job done as well as I like.

PC_load_letter
June 27th, 2010, 08:01 AM
I know it's a totally different realm, and it may not be a good suggestion, but how about using the Beamer package in LateX?
If you haven't used LateX in the past, it does have a very steep learning curve, but once you get past the essentials, you'll be ready to rock and roll.

You could also use Beamer from Lyx, it's in the repos. I myself use Geany w/ the Latex plugin as an editor. Others use Gedit w/ its Latex plugin, both awesome.

Once you're done writing your presentation, you could use keyjnote (now called Impressive) from the repos for transition effects. It's a CLI tool, just start the terminal in the directory of your presentation and type
$ keyjnote presentation.pdf

Don't forget to read the man pages for all sort of options, just type:

$ man keyjnote

siimo
June 27th, 2010, 11:05 AM
Free as in beer maybe, if it's coming from Microsoft...I've realized using closed-source ANYTHING is always a step in the wrong direction.

Not many, if any, cloud based applications are open-source.

Kimm
June 27th, 2010, 11:34 AM
I realize you turned down Office Live, but I though I should still point out that you can create presentations with Google Docs.

yossell
June 27th, 2010, 01:52 PM
I second PC's suggestion of Beamer - if you know any Latex already, I'd definitely give it a go. Beamer is excellent and, in my view, vastly superior to powerpoint or any clone I've touched.

Johnsie
June 27th, 2010, 02:11 PM
I would never use Linux for a presentation. It looks cheap, tacky and unprofessional. In a professioanl world it helps to appear to have put a little money into your work and well, the professional proprietary stuff just looks so much better. Presenter Pro is great for presenations but it's not supported on Ubuntu.

K.Mandla
June 27th, 2010, 02:30 PM
I am not a big fan of OpenOffice, and I've been looking for a PowerPoint replacement candidate.
tpp!

http://www.ngolde.de/tpp.html

PuddingKnife
June 27th, 2010, 04:16 PM
You can guarantee your audience will be falling asleep if you use Powerpoint.

insane_alien
June 27th, 2010, 04:27 PM
You can guarantee your audience will be falling asleep if you use Powerpoint.

if that happens then you're using it wrong.

the slides should be a supplement to your presentation rather than the presentation itself.

i recently gave a half hour presentation on my project at work. i had a total of 5 slides.

the first was an introductory slide with my name, position and title of the project(plus the standart company logo from the template)

the second was a picture

the third was an equation and a graph

the fourth was a table sumarising predictions vs experimental results

the fifth merely had "Any Questions?"

the audience(about 15 people) paid good attention through out the whole thing and we ended up having about 2 hours of discussion on the finer details and consequences of the results enough to show that pretty much everybody had gained a good understanding from my presentation.

if your audience is falling asleep then YOU are doing something wrong, its not powerpoint/impress/whatever's fault.

phrostbyte
June 27th, 2010, 04:35 PM
I've done some pretty high profile presentations using Impress. I hate to brag, but almost every time I do a tech talk about pretty much anything, it is highly received. I've had someone call me weeks later to tell me how awesome one of my talks was just recently.

But that has less to do with slides and more to do with preparation/public speaking skills. Oh, and picking interesting topics to present (interesting to your audience).

If you take some time to learn how to use Impress effectively, I think it is better then anything Microsoft has.

Also I second insane_alien. Please remember, if you are reading ANYTHING off your slides, you are doing it wrong.

chessnerd
June 27th, 2010, 05:20 PM
When looking for alternatives, never forget to check out alternativeto.net and osalt.com. Both are great resources for finding alternatives to popular software. On osalt, I found that there is a KDE program called KPresenter available. However, if you are looking for a light-weight Gnome program, I don't think that's it.

http://www.osalt.com/kpresenter

PuddingKnife
June 27th, 2010, 05:29 PM
if that happens then you're using it wrong.

the slides should be a supplement to your presentation rather than the presentation itself.

i recently gave a half hour presentation on my project at work. i had a total of 5 slides.

the first was an introductory slide with my name, position and title of the project(plus the standart company logo from the template)

the second was a picture

the third was an equation and a graph

the fourth was a table sumarising predictions vs experimental results

the fifth merely had "Any Questions?"

the audience(about 15 people) paid good attention through out the whole thing and we ended up having about 2 hours of discussion on the finer details and consequences of the results enough to show that pretty much everybody had gained a good understanding from my presentation.

if your audience is falling asleep then YOU are doing something wrong, its not powerpoint/impress/whatever's fault.

Just speaking from experience. Ive never used it in a presentation, but Ive certainly lost interest and seen that in a lot of other people too.

I will say the way you describe your method sounds a bit livelier.