GNOME Office Should Add A PowerPoint Knockoff

[SuperMike]

I use GNOME Office because it's reliable, zippy fast, blends well with the GNOME desktop, and reads and writes MS Office proprietary formats fairly well. There's only one drawback -- there's no PowerPoint knockoff.

I'd like to see GNOME Office add that.

[Sluipvoet]

They used to have one, but I think it's pretty dead.
Agnubis (http://www.gnome.org/projects/agnubis/index.shtml)

[Sef]

They used to hava one, but I think it's pretty dead.

Considering that the copyright and snapshots are from 2002, I think you are right.

[kanem]

There was a more recent try in Criawips (http://www.nongnu.org/criawips/), but I fear it may be dead now too.

[tebibyte]

Regardless of whether it is available or not it would still be nice to have. We need another open source alternative to openoffice.org's Impress. OOo is way too hard to use. I know I may sound critical, but it is harder to use than MS office. Gnome office on the other hand has a lack of features, that is why it is so light weight and is easy to use.

If there was only a way to have more features than MS office, be easier to use, and be 100% open source.

[happy-and-lost]

Hear hear. I think Gnome Office needs a little polishing up and better integration. AbiWord and Gnumeric feel like totally different apps. A "OpenOffice From Template" style launcher would be really nice,

[qalimas]

What about the one from KOffice?

[GeneralZod]

What about the one from KOffice?

Doesn't integrate into GNOME, and the KOffice devs have stated that they will be concentrating on Open document formats rather than Microsoft's proprietary ones.

[Bloodfen Razormaw]

AbiWord and Gnumeric feel like totally different apps.
That's because they are. Abiword isn't even a GNOME application, it just happens to use GTK+. A lot of people don't seem to realize that there is no such thing as GNOME Office. GNOME has no office suite. They simply picked several programs (not even requiring that GNOME have anything to do with them) that did a very, very tiny subset of what an office suite does and declared it to be a suite (in earlier releases GNOME actually declared OO.o to be the GNOME office suite!)

[SuperMike]

That's because they are. Abiword isn't even a GNOME application, it just happens to use GTK+. A lot of people don't seem to realize that there is no such thing as GNOME Office. GNOME has no office suite. They simply picked several programs (not even requiring that GNOME have anything to do with them) that did a very, very tiny subset of what an office suite does and declared it to be a suite (in earlier releases GNOME actually declared OO.o to be the GNOME office suite!)

Interesting. Didn't know that.

[kripkenstein]

This is slightly off-topic, but perhaps it'll interest someone. There is a good fully open-source alternative to PowerPoint, if you don't mind losing WYSIWYG, and if you don't mind Latex (two big "ifs", I know :) ). It's called Prosper, is in the Ubuntu repos, and works great. Basically you write Latex, and a few commands are added for working with slides. So you have all the advantages of Latex (nice and easy math equations, etc), and you can create very impressive presentations that you can output to PDF (and do a slideshow with any PDF viewer that can do full-screen).

[Bloodfen Razormaw]

If you do mind Latex, I can see Scribus being very good at that. You could make something much more attractive with a DTP application than with a presentation application, and you would probably be less inclined to turn your presentation into a "just-read-the-slide" debacle. Presentation applications are overrated.

[neoflight]

thank you for the prosper info. OOo iis not good in presentations. It lacks several intuitive features I need for my presentations.

[SuperMike]

It's like, if you have Linux, and you don't want to use OO's Impress, then use ZOHO (http://www.zoho.com/) if you want to use something with a GUI.

[neoflight]

this thread should be in education and science forum? just a thot

[rowanparker]

this thread should be in education and science forum? just a thot
Presentations aren't just used in education though.