Open Office Annoyances

Impress insert picture problem

While i mainly hate Microsoft Office 2007 for lots of good reasons such as the giant, non-movable menu that takes all the screen real estate and the fact that drop down menus obscure the content under them -but open office also has some annoying habits.

twitter = someone just told me to right click on the ribbon and it can be minimized. This point out the other problem with 2007 - 10 years of word knowledge down the drain...i used the program for an hour before discovering the 'office button' which looks like a decoration is in fact a control and can be clicked. The control has no affordance to indicate it can be clicked - you learn by trial and error with 2007.

The first Open Office annoyance was the default box around the page - so 1990's but easy to turn off once you know where.

Today i discovered that the default behaviour of Impress is to put a link to a graphic into the presentation. This may be done to keep down the size of the presentation but it is a HUGE inconvenience when you upload presentations to make them available as suddenly //gnickers/home/documents/presentations/sept 30/images/stock prices.jpg is not displayed in the presentation but only a link to a file that Impress cannot find. I had been inserting images from files and while this works on your computer it fails when you move the presentation to the classroom.

What i've been doing as a workaround is opening the image in the GIMP and doing a copy and paste into the Impress slide. This embeds the image so that the presentation works as you would expect.

At least powerpoint embeds the image in the presentation - ok it make the presentation 6 mb in size but that is a small one these days. Hell, people send 4mb e-mails without thinking.

The OO wiki notes "Also, with many large images, OpenOffice.org consumes more memory and may crash."

The setting probably can be changed. Let's see how easy it is to find...ah from the oo wiki the answer appears:

Notice in the Insert picture dialog the two checkboxes called Link and Preview. Their position is determined by the operating system, but they are normally in the bottom part of the dialog.

If Preview is checked a thumbnail of the selected image shows in the preview area on the right.

Select the Link checkbox to insert the picture as a link to the file rather than embedding the file itself. In general it is preferable to embed images so that the presentation can be copied to other computers, however on some occasions it makes sense to link the image rather than embed it:

• When the image file is quite large (linking rather than embedding will dramatically reduce the size of the presentation file)
• When the same image file is used in many presentations (for example when using the same background image for all the presentations created)
• When the linked file will be available when loading the presentation (for example if the presentation is a slide show of holiday pictures)

Test

So we select Insert picture from a USB stick and in the dialog box are the two checkboxes and neither of them are checked so the default if you do nothing is to LINK. Personally, i think this is bad default choice. I select PREVIEW and it works. We unmount the USB and the picture is still there - whereas before just the URL would show.

Problem solved....Time for some tea

Latest annoyance is the Fonts menu display. Instead of just showing a list of fonts and what they look like it has a blue A and and up and down arrow at the start of each font which is really annoying. The question is why? Do they have some meaning? If i install some postscript type 1 fonts will they have s different prefix in the list - perhaps a blue P? Don't know but i would like to get rid of the blue letter and red arrows!

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