Something Slightly Annoying in Powerpoint Presentations That Affects Using Them in OpenOffice.org Impress

Note March 2007: Tip from a reader, John:

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I had problems with templates until I read your tip - however, once I understood the problem, I did find a slightly easier
way to title them correctly.  It's not the OO Converter that inserts PowerPoint Presentation as the title.  The converter picks up the title from the original PowerPoint file.  Therefore, BEFORE you run the conversion, locate the template files in the MS Office folder and do the following for each one:

Right click on the file/ select Properties/ select Summary - in the title field, Powerpoint Presentation will be highlighted.  Just type in the title that you want for this template and click on OK.

When you have done them all, then run the OO Document Converter and they will be converted with the correct titles.

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It was interesting to figure it out, but the end result is more work for us all.

Here's the deal. In theory you can run the Document Converter (File > Wizards > Document Converter) to convert all those lovely Microsoft Office templates you want to use in OpenOffice. The wizard creates converted copies. You then copy those copies to openoffice\share\templates\en-us\ and they show up in all your template windows. (If necessary, restart the program and/or the computer to make them show up.)

All of that works just great with Writer and Calc, and the converter works just fine for everything, including Powerpoint/Impress.

But here's the deal.

The Powerpoint templates each have a different filename, of course. blue, red, bluefancy, etc.

But they all have the same TITLE, the name that appears in the upper left corner when you're looking at the document. The TITLE is different than the FILENAME. The TITLE of every Powerpoint template, at least in the versions I've looked at, is empty and the converter assigns the value PowerPoint Presentation during the conversio. So the converted templates end up all having the SAME TITLE.

Why does this matter? Doesn't the template organizer in OpenOffice.org use the file name?

NO. IT DOES NOT.

DAMMIT.

The template organizer in OpenOffice.org uses a document's TITLE.  (In OpenOffice.org, you set it under File > Properties > Description, Title field.)

So that means that when you copy a bunch of templates to the template directory, all with the same TITLE, the organizer gets horribly confused and won't let you get to more than one.

So here's what the converted templates look like when I just copy them to my  openoffice\share\templates\en-us\ directory. It's all fine right here.

But when I take a look at the templates organizer, File > Templates > Organize, then this is what it looks like.  Only ONE template, and with the default TITLE that the converter put in.

And likewise here's what it looks like in the wizard.

So what do you do when you want to take a bunch of Powerpoint templates and use them in OpenOffice.org?

You get an intern, or you get a couple beers and an extra hour or so, and you do it one step by painful step. The same way you'd do it with a normal OpenOffice.org that you want to make into a template.

In OpenOffice.org, open the Powerpoint template. Choose File > Templates > Save. Select a category, specify the TITLE in the Name field, and click OK. All the titles must be unique.

Rinse and repeat.

If you have a quicker version of this, or if you didn't encounter this problem, let me know!

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Comments

[DPeach]

Wow, that has to be annoying.

One of the other annoying problems I have had is submitting bug reports. I hope someone reading this will be able to get a bug report submitted (if you have not already). I tried to figure out the bug reporting system once since I was involved in VERY early versions of OOo. It was so confusing for me that I ended up never submitting a bug report though I have encountered several along the way. Here's to hoping you do better than me.