At 21:09 31/12/2008 -0500, Tim Lonly wrote:
On the Quickstarter and the opening screen, there is listed Presentation. In the Extension repository there it is listed as Impress. Why is Impress called "Presentation" instead of Impress for these links? It seems to me a confusing thing to me.
Impress is the name of the component (if indeed OpenOffice has components) and "presentation" is the type of document. This distinction occurs for all OpenOffice document types, not just for presentations.
Whilst some well-known office suites are actually a collection of separate applications, OpenOffice is more of an integrated whole. When you have OpenOffice open, you have all of it available, not just one component. It is more helpful to think of OpenOffice as a single application which is capable of creating and editing documents of different types. (Failing to understand this is one reason why people can be confused by the welcome screen in version 3. If you close all open documents but not OpenOffice itself, which component do you have? Answer: None, but you still have OpenOffice - and that's why you now see the welcome screen, which invites you to create or open a document of any relevant type.)
When you have OpenOffice started, and whether or not you have any document or documents open, you can create a new document of any of its types. The Quickstarter, the welcome screen, the File | New > menu, and the New button in the Standard toolbar all reflect this by listing not application components but document types: Text document, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Drawing, Database, Formula. Strangely, the entries in the program menus instead list names for components: Base, Calc, Draw, Impress, Math, Writer (though OpenOffice.org, leading to the welcome screen, is also listed). But these program entries do not so much start a specific component as start OpenOffice and then create a fresh document of the appropriate type.
You might wonder why OpenOffice preserves these component names. Is it for historical reasons? Or perhaps to make OpenOffice appear more familiar to those new users who are used to Another Office Suite? Of course, the "Why?" doesn't matter in understanding how to use OpenOffice or to think of it.
Brian Barker --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
