Package for CD in Impress

[Olga Ruiz]

I made a presentation in Impress with music, when I send it to my friends they see it, but cannot hear the music. When I do presentations in Power Point I look For package For CD on Files to send the presentation and the music. I don't know how to do it in Impress. Need Help Please!!!

[acknak]

... in Power Point I look For package For CD...

Unfortunately, Impress does not have this function.

You need to send both the presentation, and any sound files it needs. You can just copy all the files to the CD, but you'd better test it: many people report that Impress has trouble locating the sound files on the receiving end, for some reason.

Also, the person who wants to play the file will need to have OpenOffice in order to view the presentation.

[richeoti]

This feature lack makes Impress worthless as an enterprise tool.
There must be a way to take presentations with you to shows and presentations without having to take along OpenOffice on a laptop!
I am an IT person trying to convince an enterprise the OO3.0 is ready for prime time...
and this is a major gotcha!!!

[acknak]

There must be a way to take presentations with you to shows and presentations without having to take along OpenOffice on a laptop!

FWIW, I agree there is a need for this, but the answer is not a feature for packing up a presentation on a CD (although that would be a useful feature).

The answer is to convert the presentation to some other format. I typically use PDF, because I don't need sound, animations or transitions. If you need those things, then you need to convert the presentation to a video format, or to Flash. There are some backdoor workarounds to do that, but it would be huge if OOo would offer it as easily as export to PDF.

BTW, it is easy enough to take OOo with you: just use "Portable OOo" on a memory stick.

[perspectoff]

There are two solutions to this problem.

a) Both involve an Autorun.inf file and a batch file.

i) First, create an autorun.inf file with a text editor. It only needs these lines:

[autorun]
open=slides.bat

The autorun.inf file should go in the root of the CD.

ii) Then create a batch file to start your presentation. The contents of the batch file depends on whether you will use OpenOffice to display the Impress presentation, or whether you will use PowerPoint Viewer 2003. Edit your batch file with a text editor, name it slides.bat, and place it in the root directory of the CD.

Then when you insert the CD in a drive, it will run your program automatically.

A) Using Open Office to start the slide show:

i) Copy your entire OpenOffice folder onto the CD. The name of the folder must not have spaces or punctuation (since batch files don't recognize those in the name). For example, copy your OpenOffice 2.4 folder onto the CD into a folder called OpenOffice24.

The Open Office program on the CD will be found, therefore, at OpenOffice24/program/soffice.exe

ii) Let's say your presentation is called Presentation.odp. Place it in the root folder of the CD. Then the batch file (slides.bat) should contain the single line:

OpenOffice24/program/soffice.exe -show Presentation.odp -quickstart

(The -quickstart option is optional).

That's all you need. The only problem with this method is that when you start OpenOffice on a computer that doesn't already have OpenOffice installed, it goes through the entire registration process for whatever user is viewing the CD, prior to showing the slideshow. That is a pain. Also, the OpenOffice Impress slideshow viewer is very slow compared to PowerPoint Viewer 2003. But, this solution can work for Linux as well as Windows, and allows you to keep everything in OpenOffice.

B) Using PowerPoint Viewer 2003.

Only this version of PowerPoint Viewer is easy to use. Don't use Powerpoint Viewer 97 or PowerPoint Viewer 2007. Neither works very well (Microsoft crippled them on purpose).

i) You can download PowerPoint Viewer 2003 for free from Microsoft until October 2009. Install it on your computer, then look for the installed PowerPointViewer folder in your Programs\Microsoft\Office folder (or something similar).

You should see these modules in that folder:

gdiplus.dll
intidate.dll
pptview.exe
ppvwintl.dll
pvreadme.htm
saext.dll
unicows.dll

Copy the entire folder onto your CD so that all the modules are included. Keep the folder name PowerPointViewer.

For additional information see this article:
http://www.indezine.com/products/powerp ... iewer.html

ii) Export your presentation from OpenOffice Impress as a PowerPoint 97/2000/XP document, naming it something like Presentation.ppt. Place the presentation file in the root of your CD.

iii) Edit the batch file (slides.bat) so that the line reads:

PowerPointViewer\pptview.exe Presentation.ppt

That's it! If the viewer doesn't have MS Office or PowerPointViewer on their computer already, they will be presented the first time with a one-click registration box (but this is better than the 5-step OpenOffice registration dialogue!).

PowerPointViewer 2003 is very fast, very lightweight, and is a nice solution if you know that the user will have a Windows machine. It doesn't work for Linux users, of course.

Naturally, you can use the same solutions on a USB flash drive instead of a CD, as well.

[richeoti]

You all seriously think this is a workaround!?!?!?!
Try telling that to one of my salesmen (or even the engineers I support) who needs to make a portable presentation with OOo!
Even the OpenOfficePortable is too hard for non-geeks to figure out and use.

Impress is not yet ready for Enterprise replacement of Powerpoint!!!

[TheGurkha]

Impress is not yet ready for Enterprise replacement of PowerPoint!

No one here will argue with that. (And no one here said it was.) It is what it is, and it is still maturing.

Does this help: Impress Runner.