17 Mar
2009

Open Office Presenter View

I was delighted to discover recently that Open Office have released a working version of their long-anticipated Presenter View. Both Powerpoint (from Microsoft) and Keynote (on the Mac) have these views which allow someone giving a presentation to see the current slide, the next slide(s), any notes associated with the current slide and some timing/progress information. Personally I’ve been booting into windows solely to deliver presentations for a couple of years now, partly for the Powerpoint Presenter View and partly because Linux isn’t very friendly about driving second screens.

Well, one of those problems has been eliminated with this new plugin for Open Office. It only works with Open Office 3 or above (I’m using 3.0.1). You’ll also need to download the extension from the project page which you can find here:

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/presenter-screen

Go to Tools -> Package Manager and browse to the .oxt file you downloaded from the site, and restart Impress – hopefully everything should just work! The settings are hidden in the “Slideshow Settings” screen, look right at the bottom. And with luck, you’ll see your slides on your second screen as usual, and something like this on your main screen:

All I need to do now is figure out why I sometimes have issues with xrandr and projectors, and I’ll be ready to go!

3 thoughts on “Open Office Presenter View”

  1. This is a mini-primer on using xrandr to configure a second screen under Linux, but first I’ll start with some background. I’ve been a linux user for a few years now but when I started working for Ibuildings I started giving presentations, either as a

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  2. I had a problem with the presenter view on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 – it just wasn’t showing the presenter screen at all. I discovered that Ubuntu now has this available as a package, which is great – just install openoffice.org-presenter-console and you are good to go :)

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