I hate MS like pure poison, but....

I refuse to pay the powerpoint 'tax' just to be compliant and hate the fact that the university seems to only be able to use MS stuff, so I use Libreoffice exclusively (That and I use Linux on my own machines, so cross OS functionality is important to me). Once you get to know it, and put a wee bit of work in converting stuff, it can show PP stuff almost as original. I have found that it is usually down to the templates used in the original PP presentation about 90% of the time, a wee big of changing the master slides and most things can be fixed.

The presentation console has won over a few other people in the department when they see me using it, the ease of having your notes and a preview of the next screen on your laptop, while the projector shows the main screen is very handy when lecturing. And all the undergrads nowadays seem incapable of taking handwritten notes, it happily outputs direct to a PDF file for the wee darlings.
 
What I was wanting to do (and have in fact done) is create a PowerPoint of a virtual lecture to put online. When I tried to view it in WordPerfect's presentations viewer it sucked asteroids.

I use PowerPoint because that's what I use at work, and (unlike almost everything else MS has produced) I like it. I've never tried WordPerfect's presentations application as a creation tool, and I don't think I want to start.

My big question is, if I finish this PowerPoint I'm working on, and I can do that because I have Thin Client access at home to PowerPoint on the office server, what can I do with it? If it's not going to be viewable by third parties on their own computers when they download it, I'm screwed. I also don't much fancy the file being edited by anyone else. I just want it to play for anyone, slides and narration, but I'm beginning to think that's an unrealistic objective.

I have done this, which is the slides and narration as a PowerPoint (and yes it needed editing, PowerPoint is OK but once you put it near Word you're looking at major user-hostility, as usual). So the narration is just typed rather than being a voice-over with full-screen slides, and the slides that have flying elements don't fly. But is this the best I'm likely to be able to do?

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
I have done this, which is the slides and narration as a PowerPoint (and yes it needed editing, PowerPoint is OK but once you put it near Word you're looking at major user-hostility, as usual). So the narration is just typed rather than being a voice-over with full-screen slides, and the slides that have flying elements don't fly. But is this the best I'm likely to be able to do?
Click to expand...
Like I said before, make it into a video - it's easy!

Making a PDF is also a good way to control how your presentation gets displayed.
 
Yes, I saw that, and I'm at the "tell me more!" stage. I haven't followed your link, as of yet.

I tried out on a short PowerPoint I'm pretty much finished with, and the recorded narration worked a treat. Or would if I raised my voice a bit. I could play it back and just watch the slides and listen to the narration on my heedphones. But that still needs PowerPoint to load the slides and play the sound track. And if you do that as far as I can see it also allows the presentation to be edited.

I'm thinking of asking our IT people about this, because I could see it as a useful teaching facility. The students are given access to the slides on the college server, usually a day or two before the lecture so they can print a copy to take notes on if they want. I wonder about giving them access to the whole lecture, spoken narration and all, as a slide show. But we wouldn't want them to have the power to edit the presentation. What sort of a response would I get, I wonder?

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
Yes, I saw that, and I'm at the "tell me more!" stage. I haven't followed your link, as of yet.

I tried out on a short PowerPoint I'm pretty much finished with, and the recorded narration worked a treat. Or would if I raised my voice a bit. I could play it back and just watch the slides and listen to the narration on my heedphones. But that still needs PowerPoint to load the slides and play the sound track. And if you do that as far as I can see it also allows the presentation to be edited.

I'm thinking of asking our IT people about this, because I could see it as a useful teaching facility. The students are given access to the slides on the college server, usually a day or two before the lecture so they can print a copy to take notes on if they want. I wonder about giving them access to the whole lecture, spoken narration and all, as a slide show. But we wouldn't want them to have the power to edit the presentation. What sort of a response would I get, I wonder?

Rolfe.
Click to expand...

How about setting a password?
http://www.acoolsoft.com/support/knowledges/protect-your-PowerPoint.html
I don't have any use for presentation software, haven't messed with it. So I can't say anything about how well it locks. I used to use Harvard Graphics to design buttons, though....heh. I still have a couple I made laying around somewhere.

I guess I've just been lucky, or something - I got Office 2010 for $9.99 (and a backup copy on disc for another $13) through the University of Illinois a few months ago. I checked again a few weeks later, and found that the price had gone back up (don't remember how much, though).

The thing about trying to use Word or WordPerfect, when you're used to using the other one, is that you aren't just trying to learn from scratch, you're having to separate the two entirely different systems in your head while you learn. Confusing.

I started out using WP in the late '80s, tried Word (hated it), and then went a while without having need of a word processor (so glad I unloaded that old Xerox 860, it weighed a ton, was wimpy, and required 8" floppies). When i started at UofI, we had Windows 3.1, and MS Office. At first, I was annoyed at having to learn to use something I despised. Since I had no choice, but to learn to use it, I did. At some point, I picked up a copy of WP Office 6, but never had much call to use it at home, so I gave up on it.

I got Adobe Acrobat X as part of the package, when I bought the graphics software I needed, and boy is that great! It integrates with Word very nicely, and will save webpages (most of them, anyway) as .pdf.
 
Rolfe said:
I began on Word on a Mac in about 1991 or 1992, but very soon switched to WP for Windows on a PC.

WP is much, much more intuitive than Word. I almost never need to look anything up, I can find out how to do what I want to do by scanning the menus, or just trial and error.

WP does what you tell it to do, not what it thinks you ought to be doing. When I use Word it's always trying to change my font or my formatting or anything else that takes its fancy. WP does as it's told.

WP has a fantastic feature called "reveal codes". A field that allows you to see and edit every single code in the document. So if it is doing something you don't like, you can look at the codes, find out why, and zap it. Basically the codes work very much like html - italics on/italics off, and so on.

The result is much more compact files, by the way. The full wordprocessed document is usually not much larger than the text would be as a simple text file.

You can drag your margins anywhere you want and they'll go there and stay there. It does parallel columns. (I thought I just hadn't found the right command for that in Word, I am gobsmacked it doesn't do it.) Although the default customisation tends to look uncomfortably like Word these days, you can soon get rid of that. It even lets you customise all your menu buttons so they have actual words rather than those stupid icons.

Did I mention it's intuitive?

It's the cat's pyjamas.

Rolfe.
Click to expand...

I nearly cried when we moved from WP to Word because 'everyone uses Word'. Reveal Codes was absolutely fantastic - anything 'funny' in a doc could always be identified and fixed by reveal codes. As you say, the main difference was it just did what it was told and didn't try and guess what you wanted to do or decide it knew better. At the time, the TextArt feature was way ahead of anything in Word as well.

The macro language was pretty nifty as well.

Ah the good old days (WP5.1 to WP6.0 to show just how ancient I am!).
 
Ethan Thane Athen said:
I nearly cried when we moved from WP to Word because 'everyone uses Word'. Reveal Codes was absolutely fantastic - anything 'funny' in a doc could always be identified and fixed by reveal codes. As you say, the main difference was it just did what it was told and didn't try and guess what you wanted to do or decide it knew better. At the time, the TextArt feature was way ahead of anything in Word as well.

The macro language was pretty nifty as well.

Ah the good old days (WP5.1 to WP6.0 to show just how ancient I am!).
Click to expand...
Pfft. I used Word Perfect for DOS, where the only way you could tell something was in italic was because it was blue.

#hipster

But yeah, I always wished Word would do something as useful as Reveal Codes.
 
Coming late to the party here, but: Word is by nature fiddly, mouse-y and layout-y. Which is fine if you want to create the feeling that you're working and being productive, but is absolutely rubbish if you want to get text written.

Depending on use, I write text either in a plain text editor or in Lyx (which I know is cheating, but I just don't write enough text that needs proper layout that it's worth it for me to learn Latex.)
 
uruk said:
I can do you one better (in the opposite direction)

Without Steve Jobs at the head, Apple will flounder within ten years as those left in charge will eventually duke it out over what direction to take the company and what new products to develop to market.

MS will bail out Apple again like they did back in the 90's after Jobs had regained control of Apple by buying large amounts of stock. But this time there will be no Steve Jobs to drive the company back to the top again.

And Apple dies a slow fading death much the same way the Amiga did back in the 80's

I think read it in a Nostradamus quatrain somewhere.
Click to expand...

Don't think you can pin so much success on the one man, remember his track record prior to the last decade was pretty poor. (Please note I am not saying he had no input or wasn't a great influence on Apple's recent success.)
 
He was at least a compelling focal point; without him it will be interesting to see what directions Apple takes amd I genuinely would not be surprised to see some disastrous products looming. That'll only have to happen once or twice to break the spell.

I've used Wordperfect, and I've used Word. I preferred Word, but to a huge extent it is what you're used to; it was the first WYSIWYG word processor I used when everything else showed formatting in different colours (or greys and shading, more like).

Word certainly has some niggling annoyances, and while I've not used WP enough recently to say whether it has some of its own I bet it does.
 
arthwollipot said:
Pfft. I used Word Perfect for DOS, where the only way you could tell something was in italic was because it was blue.

#hipster

But yeah, I always wished Word would do something as useful as Reveal Codes.
Click to expand...

WP for DOS was infinitely better than any version of Word. WP at least treated me like an adult.
 
zooterkin said:
Pfft! Kids today! I used to use WordStar on my twin 5 1/4" floppy CP/M ICL PC. And everything was in green.
Click to expand...

Darned kids and their new fangled gadgets. WordStar on an Altair 8080 with dual 8 inch drives - program on one drive, files on the second.


Get off my grass!
 
Korren said:
Coming late to the party here, but: Word is by nature fiddly, mouse-y and layout-y. Which is fine if you want to create the feeling that you're working and being productive, but is absolutely rubbish if you want to get text written.

Depending on use, I write text either in a plain text editor or in Lyx (which I know is cheating, but I just don't write enough text that needs proper layout that it's worth it for me to learn Latex.)
Click to expand...

Erm, if all you want to do is to type in some text, Word doesn't get in the way of that at all. It doesn't insist that you do any formatting whatsoever. Most of the things that it does can be accessed via keyboard. Just a couple of weeks ago, I made a list of all the keyboard shortcuts for a blind friend. I use notepad all the time, but only for things like lists.
 
zooterkin said:
Pfft! Kids today! I used to use WordStar on my twin 5 1/4" floppy CP/M ICL PC. And everything was in green.
Click to expand...

I'd entirely forgotten about WordStar. It was all in amber, for me. Then I switched to a bootleg copy of WP, which took a bit of time to get used to, but it worked so much better. Still amber, though.
 
Rolfe said:
Yes, I saw that, and I'm at the "tell me more!" stage. I haven't followed your link, as of yet.

I tried out on a short PowerPoint I'm pretty much finished with, and the recorded narration worked a treat. Or would if I raised my voice a bit. I could play it back and just watch the slides and listen to the narration on my heedphones. But that still needs PowerPoint to load the slides and play the sound track. And if you do that as far as I can see it also allows the presentation to be edited.

I'm thinking of asking our IT people about this, because I could see it as a useful teaching facility. The students are given access to the slides on the college server, usually a day or two before the lecture so they can print a copy to take notes on if they want. I wonder about giving them access to the whole lecture, spoken narration and all, as a slide show. But we wouldn't want them to have the power to edit the presentation. What sort of a response would I get, I wonder?

Rolfe.
Click to expand...

I prefer to lecture with just a piece of chalk. Got it to where no lecture notes are needed. It's cool to walk in a classroom empty handed and just go at it.

With all you are doing, what incentive do students have to come to class?

I wondered about the whole power point lecture thing (do many students accuse you of just reading from the slides?) So, I wonder what advantage slides bring to teaching?

I realize there are many ways to be a good teacher, so I'm not trying to ding you, just curious.
 
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