Over the holidays, one of the users of Plan-B for OpenOffice.org asked me “Is there something equivalent to Powerpoint [Viewer]?” so you do not need to own the software to receive and view ODF files.

To the best of my knowledge there is not. Actually I would think there is not need. As anybody can download Open Office for free and install the full package it is about as much work as downloading the free MS Office PowerPoint Viewer.

One could argue that this is not equivalent, because you want to only install the viewer for presentations and not the whole application. However you can install only Impress the Open Office application for presentations and the difference in file size is minimal. You even get as a goody the presenter mode, allowing you to not only view the presentation but also present it on an external monitor. Free open source has its benefits I guess.

Based on a tip from the Ubuntu Community I developed this guide how to improve Open Office performance and more responsive.

Set the Open Office memory options for improved performance as follows:

• Reduce the undo stack from the default 100 to less than 50. Keep in mind your own work style. If you are experimenting a lot, a value too small might let you run out of “Undo” operations pretty fast. If you are a slow typist, a single “Undo” might just be a single character typed.
• Increase the graphics cache to  ~10% of your main memory, but no more than 256 MB. Consider how often you use graphics. Heavy use of Impress or Draw will require more.
• Set memory per object to between 10MB and 20MB. Again this depends on what you are doing. If you are using embedded Active-X controls or large images/graphics this should be larger.
• Set the number of objects to ~20.
• Enable the OpenOffice.org Quickstarter if you use OOo more often. For occasional use it will only block memory that you could use better for other applications.

Watch a screencast of these these tips here.

According to Susan Lister, OpenOffice.org is a good tool to convert your Powerpoint presentations into good looking web pages.

Susan is dissatisfied with “clunky ‘powerpoint to webpage’ slideshows”, produced by MS Powerpoint. so she looked for a better solution and found it in OpenOffice.org Impress. She discovered:

These experiments showed that I can make a better web page set up using Open Office - my final website was a smaller file size as well as smaller in the amount of screen real estate. I liked the fact that html wizard gave me control over whether I wanted frames, show notes included and a title screen as well the size of the final presentation (640×480, 800×600, 1024×768).

Susan discovered, that the HTML web pages created by Impress not only look better but are also smaller by a factor of 10.

Reading the Technology Enhanced Learning blog, today I discovered an open source web conferencing application, called WebHuddle.

To my delight WebHuddle does offer support for OpenOffice.org Impress files to share with the audience.

What type of content may I upload for my meeting?

You may upload any combination of Microsoft Powerpoint files, Open Office Impress files, individual GIF or JPEG images, and ZIP files containing GIF or JPEG images. Note that Powerpoint animations are not visible when displayed in WebHuddle.

WebHuddle is a server centric approach to web conferencing. It server is based on Java servlet technology. The client is a small Java applet of less than 175k. It provides the basic features of sharing presentations, the desktop, files, and interacting with questions to the presenter and questionnaires. Optionally it can add a Voice over IP audio channel. In addition the whole session can be recorded and played back virtually identical.