Need help setting up a slideshow

[TVD]

Hello. I've used "real" Power Point the past few years, but now have downloaded Open Office and have some questions about how to set up a slide show for my purposes using Impress. I'm a musician and use Power Point to put my musical charts in a slide show to use during performances. Many of my charts are old hand written ones I wrote years ago, then scanned them into my computer. The rest, newer ones, are ones I write on my computer using a special font. The older scanner charts are considered "picture" files on my cpu, in the TIF format. The newer charts are in the DOC format. This is key I know. Here's my issue though. When setting up a slide show using Impress, the older TIF picture charts fit into a slide perfectly, no problemo. However, the newer chart files, the DOC ones do not. To get these in a new slide I click Insert, object, ole object, create from file, search. This then opens up my file with my charts in it, and I can select the one I want for that slide. But, When I pic a DOC file, on the slide it only shows up as a small square box in the middle of the slide, and only the title can be seen. What I have to do then is double click on the little box in the middle of the slide, and that opens it up, then I can take it grab the edge and stretch it out so it can be viewed in that slide. My basic question is what can I do to avoid this, so the DOC files will show up perfectly in the slides upon insertion as the TIF files already are. Someone advised my to download PDF995 and convert them to PDF files, and I did download it, but I can't seem to figure out at all how to convert any of my charts to PDF files. Totally missing something there.
Now, I did figure something out that does work to make DOC files fit a slide automatically, but I'm not sure it's the best route or not. What I did was to click on a Doc file, click save as, on save as type it was listed as Microsoft word/97/2000 XP DOC. I changed that and selected Openoffice.org 1.0 test document (.sxw) instead. Like I said, that does open a DOC file in the right size in a new slide. I don't like the way my chart looks as well in that format though, it's slightly distored on the top, but I can live with it. I tried putting one of the picture charts in that (.sxw) format, and it's ok, but I don't like it as well as the TIF format it's in now, and it opens in the windows pic and fax viewer. If I do have to convert all my DOC files to that (swx) thing, how would I do that with multiple files? I have over 2,000 music charts in my computer, at least half of them DOC files.
One more question, I notice when I click on insert to put a file in a slide, on the very bottom of insert it says file, when I click on that it shows all my charts, but if I click on one and try to put it in a slide, I get a red X message saying the file could not be loaded. Is there any way these files could be loaded from there? If so it would save me quite a bit of time to directly load files from there instead of having to click "picture" or "object" depending on what kind of a chart it is. Thanks in advance for any help, hope I explained myself clearly.

[acknak]

I'm pretty sure that you don't want to insert your .doc files as OLE objects. In the worst case, you'll need MS Office installed to handle the embedded object; in the best case, OOo will handle it, but will probably not do a good job. As you're discovering, OOo is weak at supporting embedded objects.

I think in order to give you some better suggestions, it will be necessary for you to provide a sample .doc file that you wish to insert into an Impress slide. Just use the "Upload Attachment" button (below the message editing area of the reply screen), or, if you file is over 120k, use a free file sharing site like mediafire.com.

[TVD]

Ok. I've attached a Doc file.

[acknak]

Ok, I see what you mean about having to resize the embedded document, but otherwise that does seem to work well, despite my reservations.

Here's a presentation with four slides made by four different methods:
1) Embedded OLE from .doc
2) Export .doc as PDF; import PDF and paste into slide. PDF import requires OOo 3 and PDF extension.
3) Copy/paste into text box as formatted text
4) Copy/paste screenshot from Writer Page Preview

Of those, 3 is the fastest but gives poor results--a lot of the formatting is lost or incorrect.

I'd say the others, 1, 2 and 4, are a toss-up. They all give good results but are rather tedious to process.

2 gives very accurate transfer and small file size. You might be able to automate a batch conversion of .doc to PDF--lot's of people have done it, but it's not trivial to set up. There may be a free service available somewhere.

Once you have PDF files, you could actually use a PDF viewer to present the "slides"; most PDF viewers have a "fullscreen/slideshow" mode.

[TVD]

Thank you very much. Of those 4, #1 looks the best when I go to the full sceen slide show, which is what I do during a performance. So, that would be just doing it like I'm doing it now right? Putting a .doc file in, then resizing it to fit the slide. #3 looks the worst. I'll tell you what's kinda weird. When I used Power Point this issue was the exact opposite. With Power Point the .doc files fit the slide perfectly, and the .tif ones did not, they were actually too big for the slide, and I had to resize them down. With Impress the .tif fits perfectly, and the .doc is too small.
Did you try the thing I said about going to a .doc file, clicking 'save as" then where it says "save as type" changing it from where it was set now on mine, which was microsoft word 97/2000 xp (.doc) to openoffice.org 1.0 text document (.sxw) When I tried that, the file will fit into a slide at the perfect size, the only problem is it reformats the document a little bit, mainly just at the top of it, but it's not a huge deal. If I decided to go that route, how could I change all my .doc files at once to the openoffice 1.0 text document setting in save as? I'd hate to go thru and do each one individually. Plus, when I did one, it created a new file of the same chart, I don't really want to end up with two of everything .doc really if I can avoid it.
I again tried to pdf one, but I must be doing something radically wrong. I clicked on a .doc file, clicked on printer, that created a pdf file, the problem is when I try to open it in any format, it's just total gibberish.

[acknak]

I don't find that this works any better than using the .doc file, or after saving the .doc file as OOo's native ODF format. I still have to adjust the view of the document on the slide and they all seem to give equally good results.

You should be able to use OOo's built-in batch file converter to convert the .doc file to ODF, but I think this happens anyway when you do Insert > Object > OLE (from .doc file). In fact, I just checked: the embedded document is in ODF format even if you embed it from the .doc file, so there's no advantage that I can see in doing a separate conversion to either .sxw or .odt.

OOo can't do anything with a PDF file without the new PDF import extension that's being developed, and that extension requires OOo 3, which isn't due to be completed until September, although you can try the beta releases now.

The advantage of using the PDF files directly (don't put them in a presentation at all) is that you won't have to worry about fonts: you can take the PDF files anywhere and they will display correctly on any computer.

Oh, and for some reason, your .doc file has macros in it. The macros can't be used by OOo; I don't know if that's important or not.