Improvements in LibreOffice’s PowerPoint presentation support
LibreOffice’s native file format is OpenDocument, a fully open and standardised format that’s great for sharing documents and long-term data storage. Of course, LibreOffice does its best to open files made by other office software as well, even if they’re stored in pseudo-“standards” with cryptic and obfuscated contents. Compatibility with PowerPoint PPT(X) presentations is therefore a challenge, but developers are working hard on improvements…
In September 2019, we announced an initiative to improve the support of PPT and PPTX files in LibreOffice. A year has passed since the last review and it is time to summarise achievements again.
Everyone is invited to participate in the PowerPoint support initiative, either in development or testing. If you are interested in joining, please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org.
Audio
Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Added import and export support for slide narrations and their icons
Borders and fills
Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Handle stroke properties of image shapes
Improve import of transparency in multi-step gradients
Slide before Miklos’s fix
Slide after Miklos’s fix
Regina Henschel:
PPTX: transparency gradient on solid fill is not considered in export
Add fill to fontwork in export to PPTX
Charts
Zhenhua Fong (PPT/X team):
Chart background is white instead of Automatic/No fill plot area
Custom shapes
Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Handle greyscale effect on bitmap filled custom shapes (blog post)
Apply mirror property to custom cropped graphic (blog post)
Import support for custom stretch values (blog post)
Import crop position of bitmap filled shape (blog post)
Import graphics cropped into custom geometry as custom shapes (blog post)
Mark Hung (PPT/X team):
Export names of custom shapes
Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Handle adjust values from both the custom shape and its placeholder
Tünde Tóth (NISZ):
Fix lost arcTo shape
Xisco Faulí (TDF):
PPT: export custom shapes as Bitmap
Hyperlinks
Tibor Nagy (NISZ):
Fix internal hyperlink to slide in PPTX
Fix lost direct hyperlink colors
Fix internal hyperlinks with PPTX export
Zhenhua Fong (PPT/X team):
Import hyperlinks from PPT
Tables
Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Table row height improvement in Impress (blog post)
Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Shadow for tables from PPTX in Impress (blog post)
Tibor Nagy (NISZ):
Fix vertical alignment in exported table
Text boxes
Attila Bakos (NISZ):
Fix exporting of placeholders
Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Fix the placeholders priority order
Text box gets displaced by text coming from master page
Text in shapes
Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Camera Rotation Improvement (blog post)
Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
SmartArt improvements in Impress, part 5 (blog post)
SmartArt improvements in Impress, part 6 (blog post)
Regina Henschel:
Text transformation “Deflate” is wrongly imported as “Inflate”
Wordart 3D is lost on round trip
Serge Krot (CIB):
Top-aligned text in imported PPTX becomes bottom-aligned
Various
Ahmad Ganzouri:
OOXML support for shadow blur
Bartosz Kosiorek (PPT/X team):
OOXML Fix storage of date in Custom Properties
Dániel Arató (NISZ):
Fix missing chart in exported PPTX
Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Protect aspect ratio of graphic bullets
Import shadow size
Luboš Luňák (Collabora):
Load images in parallel
Implement PowerPoint ‘flash’ slide transition
Mike Kaganski (Collabora):
Support for transparency attribute of glow effect
Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Crash fix for pyramid SmartArt import
Detecting 0-byte files based on extension in Impress and elsewhere (blog post)
Samuel Mehrbrodt (allotropia) and Piet van Oostrum:
Tab positions not being retained in PPT and being lost in PPTX
Tibor Nagy (NISZ):
Fix duplicated slide name with PPTX import
Vasily Melenchuk (CIB):
Support API-based MS-CRYPTO algorithms
Zhenhua Fong (PPT/X team):
Correct positions for group shapes
SmartArt caption text location is wrong
From left to right: PowerPoint, LibreOffice before Zhenhua’s fix, LibreOffice after the fix
Dear sirs,
My name is Olcay Arısoy from Turkey and us ing LibreOffice. I dont know where I write for dhis problemand decided to write you. I will try to explain my problem.
I have 3 gb. ram, 64 bit computer and windows 10, presentation will be app. 450 mb.
I am preparing a presentation full with my doughters photos, with LibreOffice Impress, but nearly and of my presenttion it beginvery often to wait and working as may be saving something for a minute. Probably I wrote a wrong place but İf you answer me or solve this problem Iwill be grateful.
If you have 450 megabytes of images in the presentation and only 3 gigabytes of RAM, it is to be expected that the saving takes a minute. As the amount of data grows, the need for resources grows.
Dear Olcay:
Your problem is Windows 10 with 3 GB of RAM.
Consider looking into a Linux distribution like Linux Mint Mate or Lubuntu.
You can put them on a USB stick and run them (pendrivelinux.com) and run the LibreOffice within Linux.
Linux uses less resources.
It is a different operating system, however, and you will have to learn how to use it well and easily. But it is good, free, and can run in 3 GB if it had to.
Also consider getting more RAM and/or upgrading the hard drive to an SSD.
But Linux is free 🙂
Peace