[Foundation-l] Florence's presentation on Wikimania

[Kat Walsh]

On 8/9/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I thought I could upload it this evening, but... the slides are ppt (as
> Wikimania participants know...); I just tried to save them in odt, but
> it changes the color of the text in various places. I tried to change
> the colors to black again and Open Office froze. So just as I explained
> a few days ago, I'll use ooo when and only when it deserve the title of
> "helpful tool".

One comment on this: though I think the rest of it went well, I was
disappointed that your answer on the Wikimania panel spoke more about
the detail of the difficulties of using OpenOffice for presentations
than the importance of supporting free tools.

My presentation was done in OpenOffice; I saved in it .ppt format to
run on the Windows machine doing presentations and it worked perfectly
there, not because I'm good at using it or because I did anything
special, but because it just worked without me having to think about
it.

Importing and exporting from each other, especially from older
versions, are a sticky point in both pieces of software (though most
of the time it works fine), but that's not much of a failure of the
free tool on its own.

I'm not going to argue that all free tools are as good as their
proprietary counterparts (some are worse, some are better), but I
think Impress and PowerPoint are equally as bad, and in the same ways.
:-)

-Kat

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