Mysterious OLE in slides

[SarahSharp]

I have an odd problem, and I'm not even sure what search terms to use to Google for it.

I opened a presentation I made a long time ago, and there's a picture that says "OLE" in front of an image in my slides. I took a screenshot since it's so hard to explain.



This shows up on all instances of the logo in my slides. I don't know what file type the original picture was. Images I know are JPEGs don't have this problem. PNGs don't show this problem, but none of the ones I tried were transparent. The OLE image doesn't go away when I go into presentation mode.

Impress seems to think there's an embedded OLE in every slide that has the logo in it. If I send the logo to the back, I can select the OLE and delete it. But why would it think there's an OLE? It never showed up before, and I certainly didn't add an OLE. I always add pictures through the menu with Insert->picture->from file.

Environment: Debian Linux, KDE, running OpenOffice.org 2.2.1. I upgraded a bunch of libraries, and I have the suspicion that it might have had something to do with deleting some of KDE's mime type packages.

Suggestions?

[acknak]

Windows makes it convenient for applications to embed these OLE objects instead of a static data file like an image. The big disadvantage is that the OLE object requires the presence of not only the data, but also the application that originally created the data. This means that your file, which seems to be complete on the original system (where all the applications are installed), is now broken when you move the file to another system. This dependency on the applications as well as the data is insidious because the user is typically unaware of the problem until it's a big problem, as in your case.

I've seen problems like this, e.g. a logo graphic created in some drawing application, where the OLE object was >1 Mb, where a simple (and portable) metafile was a few Kb.

You may be able to find some information about the object using the Navigator, but without the creating application, I don't see what you might find that would be of any help in getting the file to display correctly.

The solution is to open the logo graphic in the creating application (on Windows of course), export the graphic to an image or metafile format, and then insert that static data into the presentation.