Last night I experimented with Open Office

Several things went as expected:

 

 

Several things didn't go as expected:

• Open Office took 10 mins to decode Guy and 5 mins to decode Doors.

• Open Office took 4 hours to compress Guy into a flash file, and the output file was 17MB.

• The slide transitions are hard to make work.

• Open Office takes up a huge amount of virtual memory, and fills it right up to the top with Guy open.

 

When I put Guy into flash, I found out that the slide transitions didn't transfer from PowerPoint correctly, and you needed to click to advence the slides. I tried to fix this, but I didn't have time to save another flash file (it was 11pm), so I guess I'll try again tonight...

 

Oh, yeah! I may put the file in a NSIS installer, just to make it look more professional, and a smaller downlaod size, because 17MB without a loader (I can't use Flash without a good computer - I'm mostly stuck on a laptop at home now) it much too big - Even for broadband!

 

Yes, I am downloading Open Office (52% and 18.2KBps at the moment, which is unusually slow for here - Maybe the server has a slow connection). Well, I am actually downloading the portable version. I also have portable Firefox, and have portabalised Fresh Download, RAD Video Tools, Swiff Player, and several other programs. Anyway, back to my point: Expect some feedback soon on how well Impress reads PowerPoint, and then how it converts to Flash, or anything else Open Office converts to. My first experiments will be with Guy (which I expect to work reasonably well), and Doors (which I don't expect will work well at all). If Guy works well enough after being converted into flash, then I may get Joe (the SouthanUK Administrator) to upload it immidiately. Anyway, have a good celebration tonight, after that London 2012 success.

 

Later (16:02): I have downloaded it, and will try it out later. There was a problem with the server, so I put Fresh Download Manager on the job, and after much weeping, and gnashing of teeth, and several restarts of FDM, the download finally completed. I also posted a message to do with London 2012 on the SouthanUK Forums . Discuss it there, now!