[Solved] Presenter

[Hagar Delest]

At what point was what I believe is known as "Presenter Console" incorporated into OO Impress? I tried today at the office to run Impress Slide Show and come up with the screen I get on my personal laptop at home (first screenshot). I was not successful, instead getting what is shown in the 2nd screenshot, on the machine at the office. After coming home, it dawned on me that I may have different versions of OO on the two laptops, and I seem to remember reading that Presenter Console is a fairly recent addition to Impress. I have OO 4.1.6 on the home machine, but don't know what is on the one at the office... I *think* it was downloaded to that machine when it was new, in late 2018, but I won't be able to check it out until Monday. For the record, both machines are relatively new Dell Laptops, feeding the slide show to an Optoma projector via HDMI cable. If the laptop at the office does in fact have the latest OO version, what else could keep Presenter from running? TIA.

[RoryOF]

Check the settings in Impress, /Slide Show /Slide Show Settings. If Presentation display setting is set to All displays, then you will only get the main Impress screen on all displays. Best to check on the working computer and make a note of the setting selected there, then transfer this to the other computer.

You may also have to right click on the desktop and adjust the settings on the popup screen relating to the graphics. I'm not on a Windows machine so cannot give detailed advice on what is needed there.

[denrael]

Thanks for the quick reply. Unfortunately, I have already been through the steps you mention, to include making sure both machines are set up identically with regards to display settings. I should have pointed out that in the case of the problem laptop, the presentation part works normally; the projector shows only the audience-intended slides, not simply cloning what is on the laptop screen. It also advances the audience slides as commanded, but the laptop display does not advance in sync with the display... you have to advance them separately. Finally, also notice that on the laptop screen above, nearly all toolbar functions are greyed-out, indicating it's not in edit mode, rather *sort of* in presentation mode. Thanks again!

[RoryOF]

When using the laptop, does the main display advance when you click the advance arrow on the Presenter screen? If so, does the presenter screen advance in sync with the main screen?

[denrael]

On the "good" machine, everything advances if you click on the arrow at the bottom of the Presenter screen (or use the keyboard). On the problem machine, there *is* no arrow on the presenter screen...I used the keyboard (e.g. arrow keys) to advance to the next slide. But nothing happens on the presenter screen when you do this.

[RoryOF]

If there is no arrow on the "bad" presenter screen, that suggests that the Presenter sceen windows is over sized. Just to clarify, do you see the toolbar at bottom of that window, with the option to change to other Presenter screen views and a ticking clock/timer?

[RoryOF]

On /Slide show /Slide Show settings, check that Type "Default" is chosen, not Type "Window"

[denrael]

Yes, that was done when I duplicated settings between machines.

[denrael]

If there is no arrow on the "bad" presenter screen, that suggests that the Presenter sceen windows is over sized. Just to clarify, do you see the toolbar at bottom of that window, with the option to change to other Presenter screen views and a ticking clock/timer?

I'm not absolutely certain how to answer that without the machine in front of me. But I don't remember seeing anything at the bottom of the page when I dragged the slider to view the bottom of the page.

[RoryOF]

My experience (based on the fact that Impress and its presenter always work out of the box for me) is that the Presenter screen is sized to fill the monitor on which it is displayed. I have never found any need to alter it and a brief experinent on a three monitor system did not show any method, using any two of the monitors (of different resolutions).

However, if the toolbar bottom line is not showing on the Presenter screen (assuming this from the absence of the right arrow), that suggests to me that for some reason Impress is obtaining incorrect information about the laptop's screen resolution. How this might arise is puzzling.

[denrael]

I remember playing with resolutions during the troubleshooting process, but IIRC I was simply making sure the laptop and projector resolutions matched. I'll need to continue this quest when I have the offending machine in front of me. Meanwhile, thanks again!

[RoryOF]

The laptop and projector resolutions need not match - a current good projector might be 1920 x 1080, whereas a laptop could be 1366 x 766. If the laptop was an old laptop (an early netbook, perhaps) its resolution could be 1024 x 600, that would explain the truncated presenter screen as OO 4 does not scale its screens so small. But this is clutching at straws.

Edit: Try deleting or renaming your OO user profile; this may be remembering an over-riding but incorrect resolution for the Presenter screen.

[denrael]

"Clutching at straws" was pretty much what I was doing when I decided to try matching the resolutions. And you're absolutely right, because on the "good" setup, I have the laptop screen at 1920x1080 and the projector at 800x600. I'm wondering what sent me down that resolution path though, so you may still be on to something here...