Currently OpenOffice’s presentation program Impress lacks a presentation view with notes and so on for a second monitor during presentations. But the feature is in active development, and first results are visible.
Microsoft’s PowerPoint and Apple’s Keynote both feature a presentation mode where the projector shows the current slide while the computer monitor shows the current slide, the next slide, the time and important notes. Such a feature is very useful and the lack of it is a serious reason to not consider OpenOffice as an alternative to Apple’s or Microsoft’s solution.
SUN recognized that as a problem and dedicated developer time to it. As a result, the first big problem was already solved in the past: since OOo 2.1 OpenOffice is capable of directing the output of the presentation to specific screens. However, this is only half of it: the presentation view also needs a dedicated interface on the computer screen and also needs to sync both of them with each other. This is addressed in bug 18486. There you can also find the note that SUN actively supports the development of that feature:
I’m happy to announce that sun provides a full time developer to add this issue to OpenOffice.org. AF will develop this feature as a plugin, so it will be either available in 2.3 or you will be able to install it on your 2.3 shortly after it is released.
In contrast to that announcement the feature didn’t appear in OOo 2.3, and no add-on is released yet. But the project wiki page mentions that there is already a working version:
Due to the fact that the feature is already working it is likely that the next OOo version contains it. I do however wonder how the tool is implemented using Linux, and if it will work well together with the new RandR. After all, RandR 1.2 was designed – among other things – for such purposes.
Anyway, great to see that this feature will be provided by OpenOffice.org finally.
