Dear Developers!
My name is Gábor Iglói. I'm a medical doctor in Hungary. I'm fond of opensource software and using OpenOffice.org for 1,5 years now. I like it very much actually I have written all of my important documents using this suite including my graduate essay.
I follow the ongoing development of the OpenOffice.org 2.0 and I find it very promising. I have welcomed that the insertion of movie clips in Impress presentations has been developed. In fact, in the academic world it is very important to create and perform nice presentations for education. Unfortunately in this world M$ software has the monopoly - you just can't replace the PowerPoint because everyone uses it so when you bring your CD to anywhere you must supply your presentation in PowerPoint format. With Impress you can produce quality presentations but you can't transfer it to congresses. Even if you export it to ppt format there are some incompatibilities. And until now you could embed very limited video clips in your Impress presentations.
I've also read about and searched for OpenOffice Viewer tools. I've read about developers' opinions about this topic: too much effort to create a stuff like that for all platforms, instead OO.o gives good support for HTLM, PDF or Flash export...
This way it will be hard to give the academic world a working option for migration. You can't reproduce all effects of an Impress presentation in these formats and you can't embed movie clips either.
I would suggest that maybe it would be a very good idea and this could make OO.o even more popular if you would create an Impress Viewer. You wouldn't need to support all platforms and all OpenOffice components because
1. Unix/Linux users have already installed OpenOffice/StarOffice on their machines - this is the ultimate office suite for *nix users (I'm in this group too:) - so they don't need a viewer app
2. OO.o Writer documents can be exported to PDF quite well so everybody can handle them - so a Writer Viewer wouldn't be so important (and OO.o has good support for the DOC format)
3. You would develop an Impress Viewer for only the MS Windows platform, because other platforms' users probably has and use OpenOffice.org already.
That's why I think a standalone Impress Viewer is the most lacked component of OO.o. With the availability of a small standalone, installable or simply executable official Impress Viewer for Windows we could conquer the academic and perhaps the business scene.
Thank you reading my letter, Gábor Iglói, M.D.
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