Powerpoint Viewer / LibreOffice Impress issues
We went "live" with OpenLP for the first time yesterday and, of course, it was the day that we had a flurry of "special" requirements from two guest speakers. The issues we encountered fell into two broad camps - PowerPoint/Impress issues and Video issues - I'll put these in separate posts.
So, to the Powerpoint/Impress problems:
We currently have Powerpoint Viewer 2007 and LibreOffice Impress (not sure of the version) installed.
In our earlier testing, Powerpoint Viewer was giving some unusual results, basically:
1. The slide showing in the Live panel was one slide behind the one being projected
2. The Live panel started showing the desktop and wouldn't change no matter how many slides we clicked
These problems were intermittent, but we didn't want them happening during the service, so we switched to Impress, with a better result, but still some confusing issues:
1. When we double-click the presentation, we branch to an Impress viewer, rather than controlling the slideshow from within OpenLP. This isn't really a problem, since it worked quite well, but I'm wondering if it is the expected behaviour and/or if there is a setting that controls this?
2. We pressed 'Esc' to return from the slideshow to OpenLP; however, our speaker then wanted us to present a video and the video refused to run. In later testing, we found that this was always the case, but that we could 'reset' the system by opening a song before running the video. We've now created a blank 'reset' custom-slide to be used in such situations.
3. After the video , which we eventually ran directly in Windows Media Player (our guest speaker was very patient and gracious), we had to go back into the Powerpoint presentation, but we were taken back to the first slide, rather than the slide we left it at previously. This is not surprising and we can work around it (e.g. blank the projector while we move to the correct slide, or split the presentation into two at the point where the video is to be shown) but, again, I wonder if there is a better solution.
So, after all that, my questions are:
1. Have others had the issues we had with Powerpoint Viewer and is there a way around it?
2. Can Impress be controlled within OpenLP or does it always branch out to its own viewer?
3. Do others have the problem with showing video after an Impress presentation and is there a better solution than our 'reset' slide?
4. Is there a way to leave an Impress slideshow, then later come back in at the point you left?
We're using OpenLP v2 and Windows 7.
Thanks,
Marc H