Hi Enrique, all,
Enrique wrote:
[...]
Sophie, you are a respected member of the OOo community. I have readed many of your howto documents. Thanks a lot for all that work!
Thanks :)
Your question has touched me. As I have said in other threads, I agrre that Impress was the more variant part of OOo with respect o MSO. The new design of Impress is more like MSO (no comment here) and that may ease the migration for new users (and this is a Good Thing).
yes, I agree.
But with that change there are several functionalities of 1.1.4 Impress that has gone completely. I see two mayor problems:
a) I have been training teachers on Impress an my University, indicating how that divergent design was not less functional but in some aspects superior to MSO. Now those precise points have dropped and I feel like "floating in a vacuum".
This is exactly the concern of advanced users of Impress in our community.
b) As you correctly indicate, some of us do have a lot of pressntations in 1.1.4 that don't do very well in 2.0. Three examples: The point on layer is severe. It makes the editing of a slide in 2.0 an absolute mess. I use a lot of callouts. The new "Shape callouts" toolbox has fancy callouts but NOT the classic callout drawing object (I have filed an issue). If you import and draw qickly, you ger with different types of callouts, unintentionally. I do use dimension lines in Impress, it is impossible now to add a dimension line in Impress (anotehr issue filed)
for your last point, it's true that it's impossible to add them, but from what I have seen opening a 1.1.4 presentation in 2.0 containing dimension lines, these dimension lines are imported (not perfectly at the moment though). I feel here that previous OOo users are respected but when you loose more that hundred presentations because the functionnality is not imported, this is quite hard.
Why should we have compatibility issues with our own versions ?
My feeling is that a lot of UI decisions have considered ONLY new users coming from PowerPoint, and making life easier for them. But those decissions have affected useful items that were in use by former users of Impress. I have a feeling of have been "relegated" to second plane.
Yes, and this is not good, because as the others OOo users, you're one of those that have supported the product and make his success.
This is not to say that I do not want to see Impress updated. The page and task pane, the shapes, the enhanced animations and transitions. All that are good and welcome additions. I do know how difficult is to write code and I respect the work of teh developers. All my thanks to them.
yes, I completly agree with you.
Just that I think that the new additions do not imply, necessarily, the loss of existing useful functions. Even more when that function do exist on OOo 2.0, it's just a matter of changing a toolbar o adding a handle to something.
This is why I was asking here, 2.0 is not out, and may be those functionnalities are not in a finished state. I understand that layer mode had compatibility issues with .ppt, but imho warning users would have been a better way than removing the functionnality.
Sophie, your voice is not justy another more in OOo community. After seeing you post, I hope developers and designers will re-think a bit the whole issue of Impress refactoring, taking more in consideration the needs of those of us used to 1.1.x Impress.
Thanks Enrique, I'm used to speak for a community, but not sure that I'm heard more for that ;) I knew that my mail was not on the good list, so I'll subscribe to Graphics project and ask again here before filling issues.
In any case, I will be using OOo 2.0 when it'll come out, and advocating for it and trying to spread its knowledge in my academic world.
Of course :) pointing issues area doesn't imply that we don't recognize the great and the tremendous work that have been done by all the developers ! I've spoke to several journalists about 2.0 and any time I said it will be the greatest suite over the market. They all need our support even if we are critical sometime inside the community :)
Kind regards Sophie
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