Oct
31
Impress, from Charles Pennington
October 31, 2007 |
A few of my PCs don't have Microsoft's Powerpoint installed. I looked at buying it, but it's not particularly cheap, so I tried downloading OpenOffice , which is an open-source office suite.
In short, OpenOffice, and specifically "Impress", the OpenOffice alternative to Powerpoint, is great. A Powerpoint user will have no problems using it without any special instructions. I can't think of any useful feature that it doesn't have. It also has one big advantage over Powerpoint: you have the option of exporting your presentation to pdf, even if you don't own Adobe Acrobat. You can also export and open files in .ppt format, so a Powerpoint user can open and edit your files. I wonder why everyone doesn't just totally switch over to OpenOffice.
Troy Torrison adds:
Another presentation alternative is Apple's Keynote . If you’ve ever seen Steve Jobs give one of his presentations, you’ve seen Keynote in action. It’s reasonably priced (comes bundled with the Apple iWork suite) and quite powerful. Best of all, its built-in templates sport tasteful typography.
Comments
1 Comment so far
Archives
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- Older Archives
Resources & Links
- The Letters Prize
- Pre-2007 Victor Niederhoffer Posts
- Vic’s NYC Junto
- Reading List
- Programming in 60 Seconds
- The Objectivist Center
- Foundation for Economic Education
- Tigerchess
- Dick Sears' G.T. Index
- Pre-2007 Daily Speculations
- Laurel & Vics' Worldly Investor Articles
I totally agree. I went to OpenOffice exclusively on my home PC just over a year ago and have not had any reason to miss Microsoft whatsoever. Using Open Office is also revealing in that they have relocated a few menu items from expected MSFT Office locations - like Page Setup. Instead of Page Setup residing in the File as it does in Office, it resides in Format, which is much more logical (IE why would one go to "File" to format the page settings?). As I've become comfortable with the program I've found myself letting go of the MSFT interface paradigm. Instead of looking where a menu item was in MS Office, I look for it where it should be and always find it there.
Also love the direct export to PDF and the HTML editing, which is delightfully unburdened with the horrendous tag mess that MS Word is known for.
I've been setting up friends with OpenOffice and it has been universally appreciated, particularly v2+ editions.
This article is a good wrap-up of most of the differences between the two: http://techsoup.org/learningcenter/software/page4765.cfm