[Solved] GIF animations exported to PowerPoint

[derekmax46]

HI
I have made a large number of presentations both (before) in PowerPoint and now in Impress. I would regard myself as an experienced user.
The main use i have for presentations these days is to present songs to our Ukulele group to sing along with.
(1) I have been using .gif animations to liven up my slides. What i find a bit strange is that the gif files that have transparent backgrounds behave perfectly on the editor screen, but show a white background on the actual presentations - and some flicker and misbehave - surely this should show up in the editor screen? I only use very small ones as the big ones freeze impress for 10 minutes at a time!
(2) The reason I have been using .gif images is that when i export the Impress file to one of the .ppt formats (the Ukulele laptop that drives the projector runs Windows) (a) the image animations do not work (b) the media links do not work. If I have time I can sometimes re-make the links directly in PowerPoint but that is not the point.
(3) The "songbooks" we work from are collections of PDF or .DOCX documents, one for each song, each page as long as the song. It is possible in PowerPoint to import a page of that size, put the top at the top of the screen and then scroll it up slowly to the bottom of the document, so the audience can use it a bit like a Karaoke to sing and play along with. However in Libre Office the size of the working area is not big enough to accommodate a long document in the same way. Because of the issues in (2) I do not break the document into two scrolling halves because the conversion loses it, instead I break the document over two pages. I have tried making gif files and MP4s but for the reasons outlined above this is not practical as they become very big. So to sum up
(1) why do the gif files not work correctly?
(2) is there any way to preserve all the enhancements when you export the file to PowerPoint format?
(3) Is there any way to increase the size of the work area?
Many thanks
Derek

[Bidouille]

in PowerPoint and now in Impress

Which format is used? If you still continue with PPT(x), read this: [Tutorial] Differences between Microsoft and AOO/LO files

[derekmax46]

Thank you for that - interesting reading!!!!

I learned years ago that IT is capricious - so many 1 and 0 s - only need one or two to be "out" and things go awry!
I moved the files for my presentation to a Laptop I recently set up and the GIF files worked perfectly on the new computer, not a radically different version of Libre Office, so no real reason why (could it be codecs?)! The transparent backgrounds worked well. Some of the text on some of the slides changed format (same fonts) and slipped off the edge of the slide, but ho hum easily fixed at 2am when I noticed them. When I ported to pptx for the actual presentation, as before the sounds disappeared but this time an image animation worked and i had to reformat the text on two slides.
I find that the best way to port live text is to kill it. In Impress I either import from screenshots of the original songsheet, or I bring in the live text and convert the text frame to a bit map after I have it formatted and in place correctly - the drawback to that is that if you need to correct it you have to start again. So before the session I spend 15 minutes going through the presentation making sure that it all works in PowerPoint. For what it's worth today's 'show' went really well! I still would like a bigger, or unlimited, workspace on Impress so I could scroll longer sheets without breaking them.

I am not going to mark this as solved because there might be some other useful discussion about workarounds porting to PowerPoint. In the old days it used to be possible to make a "standalone" PowerPoint presentation. Something like that for AOO or LO would be really useful!

[Hagar Delest]

Why don't you install LO on the machine for the presentation?
I played quickly with it and there is a similar feature in the animations, it's in the category Entrance > Movie credits.
I tried with both text and a picture larger than the slide (in height) and it works fine.

[derekmax46]

Yes, my preferred solution, I Used Open Office in Windows for years before i had Linux, but i don't own the other machine and the owner does not seem to be keen on the idea! I could even boot the machine into Linux with a USB, but then I would have the link to the projector to set up and more ownership issues! I usually get just 15mins to set up and test before we start!
The problem with the scrolling is that many of the songs (see above) are as much as two ordinary A4 pages long and A4 seems to be about the size limit of a scrollable frame. When we have a shorter song, no problem, I either scroll the frame or fit it all to one window, but some are like a long piece of toilet paper and don't fit on an Impress working area, although apparently they do in Powerpoint BTW - Videoing the presentation creates an enormous file.

[Hagar Delest]

You don't need to boot the machine with Linux. If he doesn't want to install anything on his machine, then use a portable version of LO on a USB key.

[derekmax46]

Excellent Idea!!! Hadn't thought of that - would i have to be running Windows when I made the USB?

[Hagar Delest]

All depends on the machine on which you will plug the key. If its operating system is Windows, then download the Windows version of LO portable, put the presentation on that same key. Then to present it, just plug the key on the machine linked to the projector, run LO and open the presentation that is also on the key (or that can be on the hard drive).

[derekmax46]

OK I'll try that - thank you so much - takes two heads! Cheers Derek