Subj : Re: How much should I charge for fixed-price software contract?
To   : comp.programming
From : Randy Howard
Date : Sat Aug 20 2005 05:46 am

Ben Pfaff wrote
(in article <87slx5fszx.fsf@benpfaff.org>):

> Randy Howard <randyhoward@FOOverizonBAR.net> writes:
> 
>> blmblm@myrealbox.com wrote
>>> Yes, I have tried OpenOffice.  Yes, it does a pretty
>>> good job, and I'm grateful that it exists.  I don't have extensive
>>> experience with the most recent version, but previous versions ....
>> 
>> It's gotten a lot better over the last year or so, but it is 
>> still imperfect.  The powerpoint part of it is especially weak 
>> compared to its MS counterpart, but thankfully I don't care much 
>> about that anymore.
> 
> I'm surprised that you've found much to complain about in the
> OpenOffice counterpart of PowerPoint.  

if you use it instead of Powerpoint, and make your presentations 
using it instead of Powerpoit, it works fine (although it could 
use more than 3 templates for a fresh install, but that's a 
different issue).  Transferring files back and forth is pretty 
low-joy IME.

Lately, I've played around a bit with Keynote (iWork package) 
and it is really cool, but even less "portable", although it 
does allow you to export out to PDF, or even an animated flash 
presentation.  I don't have the need or the interest to actually 
do that sort of thing, but it's there.

> I used it to teach a
> course here at Stanford this quarter.  I imported the slides from
> previous quarters, which had been built by the previous
> instructors in PowerPoint, and had very few problems using or
> modifying them with OpenOffice.  A few oddities and
> idiosyncrasies, yes, but nothing much to complain about.

Try going the other way.  I worked for several days on a slide 
presentation in OpenOffice, had it looking just like I wanted it 
to, and was going to send it to someone else with a Windows 
system to look at.  I saved it off in Powerpoint file format 
(.ppt), opened it up on a Windows system with the real deal, and 
it looked like crap.  Just about everything turned out funky.  I 
wound up basically overhauling about 90% of it on Windows and 
then sending it on from there.  It could have just been a 
particular style or layout issue that didn't make the trip over. 
 It would have been much less painful to just send it as a pdf 
file instead.

-- 
Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)

.