Can anyone suggest an alternative for .ppt?[SOLVED]

Word processors, spreadsheets, presentations, translation, etc.
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Eathray
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Can anyone suggest an alternative for .ppt?[SOLVED]

#1 Post by Eathray »

Hi all,

I'm looking for an alternative for my kid's school work to OpenOffice Impress, to create .ppt presentations. I have the OpenOffice .sfs suite and it works really good for most things, but for creating a slideshow presentation, it's just too ram-heavy and crashes a lot.

I could really use a lightweight alternative. I gave Siag a try, but it didn't really set up properly. I was thinking koffice as I read somewhere that it was lighter than OpenOffice on resources. Even thought of an older version of OpenOffice.

Love to hear your suggestions.

A .pet package would be great as, I'm less than a genius (as some of you already know :) ).

Using Puppy Wary 5.0 (because it's an older machine)
Winbook J1
1gig processor
512 ram (the maximum)
live-boot install with save-file.

Thanks in advance. You guys are always so helpful and I love the Puppy community.

Eathray
Last edited by Eathray on Wed 27 Apr 2011, 18:01, edited 1 time in total.

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Makoto
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#2 Post by Makoto »

There aren't really a lot of alternatives to Microsoft PowerPoint, that I'm aware of. Less so, since you likely need it to be fairly compatible with PowerPoint (if you want the presentations to be viewed on different systems).

Have you tried using a larger swap partition or swap file? (Or a swap partition or swap file at all, if you're not using them.) Using an OpenOffice v2 version might help (I couldn't guarantee it), but I don't know how compatible the older versions are with the newer versions of PowerPoint. Besides, I was just using OO3 with my setup, and it worked fairly better than when I was using OO2. (Granted, I was using it in Puppy 4.2.1, and didn't have as large a swap as I do now... :lol: )
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technosaurus
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#3 Post by technosaurus »

whatever happened to opera show?
Check out my [url=https://github.com/technosaurus]github repositories[/url]. I may eventually get around to updating my [url=http://bashismal.blogspot.com]blogspot[/url].

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jrb
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#4 Post by jrb »

It would appear that Softmaker 2008 is still available at http://www.softmaker.de/lh-down-en.htm. I didn't try to download as I already have it and didn't want to register again.

You might see if the linux version will meet your needs.

Good Luck! J :D

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#5 Post by Lobster »

Fullerscreen
http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=02238
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 262#303262

A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Presentation

Viewnior which is in the Spup I am using has a slide show viewer

I think I would go for generation of images with XaraLX or Inkscape
+ a pic viewer slide show
Simples!
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Puppy Links Page http://www.smokey01.com/bruceb/puppy.html :D

starhawk
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#6 Post by starhawk »

There's also OOoLight... search the "Additional Software" subforum for it.

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Eathray
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#7 Post by Eathray »

jrb wrote:It would appear that Softmaker 2008 is still available at http://www.softmaker.de/lh-down-en.htm. I didn't try to download as I already have it and didn't want to register again.

You might see if the linux version will meet your needs.

Good Luck! J :D
Thanks everybody for the feedback!

I have downloaded the SoftMaker Office suite, and it didn't exactly install as described, but I have the Presentation part installed and ready. I'm going to give it a go tomorrow with my kid's science portfolio (a .ppt presentation), and I will report back on how successful it works.

At a glance it looks pretty basic and simple, plenty of options but a no-frills appearance. Hopefully that translates into low ram usage... I've maxed out this machine at 512mb, which just isn't enough for OpenOffice Impress, unfortunately. SM Presentation loads a lot faster than Impress does, so I'm guessing it's going to work out.

Thanks again, and I'll report back soon.

Eathray

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Eathray
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#8 Post by Eathray »

Hi guys,

Just wanted to report my fantastic success with SoftMaker Presentation. Worked like a charm. We finished the deal and uploaded the .ppt portfolio to my kid's school site just a little while ago.

The program interface looks slightly tinker-toy in appearance compared to OpenOffice Impress, but the bottom line is that it produced a perfectly functional PowerPoint Presentation for my kid's school project with about 15 slides, some of them fairly complicated, with no hitches, no problems, no crashing.

With the right permissions, maybe Presentation from SoftMaker could be included with Puppy some day. It would be a good presentation program to simply 'come with.'

Thanks to everybody who lent me their expertise.

Eathray

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Eathray
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A couple other solutions worth mentioning from 2 Puppy guys.

#9 Post by Eathray »

Here's a couple other solutions mentioned by mikeb and coolpup that I thought were worth mentioning:

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/SoftMakerOffice

The above is a link to SoftMaker as a .pet from coolpup. I'm sure that makes a cleaner install then mine :)

Next mikeb, suggested LibreOffice (available as a .pet?) might be lighter in weight and more stable (3.2 version) in .sfs.

Just thought I'd pass these two on.

Thanks,

Eathray

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Makoto
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#10 Post by Makoto »

As far as I've read/heard, LibreOffice is still largely a rebranded version of OpenOffice. :(
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Eathray
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#11 Post by Eathray »

Makoto wrote:As far as I've read/heard, LibreOffice is still largely a rebranded version of OpenOffice. :(
Very well could be...

I seem to remember a stripped down version of Libre or Open, but I can't recall where... it was a .pet though.

Anyway, SoftMaker worked great, and now I know there's a .pet, so hopefully that will help someone.

Thanks

Eathray

gcmartin

Re: Can anyone suggest an alternative for .ppt?[SOLVED]

#12 Post by gcmartin »

Eathray wrote:Hi all,

I'm looking ... but for creating a slideshow presentation, it's just too ram-heavy and crashes a lot. ... Love to hear your suggestions....
I'm surprised that you're having problem with crashes. That's unusual. But, if you want something that doesn't require any downloads, installation, test, and setup" , I would advise having your kid use his GoogleID. (If he doesn't already have one, every school kid has one, I think. open a browser, type Gmail.com, and register. It takes maybe a minute. total.)

Open a browser, and type DOCS.google.com and create away! Presentations, slide shows, graphics, special effects, documents, spreadsheets, files, on and on and on.

No installation, no fuss, documents created cannot be lost, you/your kid will have all of his documents at home, school, library, cell-phone, anywhere there is internet!

Hope this helps

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Eathray
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Re: Can anyone suggest an alternative for .ppt?[SOLVED]

#13 Post by Eathray »

gcmartin wrote:
Eathray wrote:Hi all,

I'm looking ... but for creating a slideshow presentation, it's just too ram-heavy and crashes a lot. ... Love to hear your suggestions....
I'm surprised that you're having problem with crashes. That's unusual. But, if you want something that doesn't require any downloads, installation, test, and setup" , I would advise having your kid use his GoogleID. (If he doesn't already have one, every school kid has one, I think. open a browser, type Gmail.com, and register. It takes maybe a minute. total.)

Open a browser, and type DOCS.google.com and create away! Presentations, slide shows, graphics, special effects, documents, spreadsheets, files, on and on and on.

No installation, no fuss, documents created cannot be lost, you/your kid will have all of his documents at home, school, library, cell-phone, anywhere there is internet!

Hope this helps
Thanks for pointing that out. I knew Google.docs could read .ppt, but did not know it could create as well.

Eathray

Edit:
Mikeb pointed out to me some security issues with Google and not keeping people's info private. Maybe if one is working on something sensitive, they want to use software that's native to their machine rather than online.

erdraug
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#14 Post by erdraug »

I know this has been solved but:
Eathray wrote:I seem to remember a stripped down version of Libre or Open, but I can't recall where... it was a .pet though.
starhawk wrote:There's also OOoLight... search the "Additional Software" subforum for it.
Link to thread: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 90&t=60590

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Béèm
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#15 Post by Béèm »

earthtray,
Very unusual to have impress crash, but then I realize you probably have no swap file/partition.
Make one of at least 256MB.
Time savers:
Find packages in a snap and install using Puppy Package Manager (Menu).
[url=http://puppylinux.org/wikka/HomePage]Consult Wikka[/url]
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