Hello, I have been using ole Microsoft office 97 and I managed to get it to do something rather unusual (and cool). Because of its visual basic underpinnings, I was able to add a 3rd party timer control (search for TimerObj.zip), and this allowed me to execute code continually which enabled me to animate the objects on the slide - I can now make my motor and my planetary gearbox rotate (consists of star shapes) or cause the colours of shapes to change over time, etc. The original reason i got it was I thought perhaps i can dual-cpu my cpu intensive macros (havnt tried yet).
Note that there are a few issues that i have not resolved yet:
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Each time a change is made the presentation window has to redraw so there is some flashing of the presentation (flashing is worse with transparency and fill effects; If I make the change on the next slide and then switch to it I should be able to avoid flashing; I have not checked to see if screen recording software can see the flashing. The slide editing window flashes in a different way),
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There is an undo-queue issue (modifications on a slide are all remembered as one step - and the animation grinds to a halt (literally). But if I go to the next slide, it starts a new undo step, which will eventually cause it to clear the first ones as fresh steps are added).
Will you consider doing something similar in LibreOffice? I forsee at least two basic changes first: please enable the ability to modify the slide while the presentation is running (with no flash please). And i need a larger workspace to allow large groups of objects to move off/onto the slide (power point 97 has a huge workspace, i can place objects (all except drawing lines) far from the slide - which is convenient for many other reasons too).
If you want to test it:
you first need to add the new control to VB via the VB editor menu. A clock appears on the VB toolbox. Place the control beside the first slide, and add command buttons on the slide to start and stop the timer. I recommend you have the timer increment the adjustment of an arrow arc (on slide 1), and the shape will auto reset itself once it reaches 360 degrees, This allows you to reference everything to a cycle. You shouldn’t reference the animation to the slide show time because sometimes that count stops (going through the slides in reverse and for some other reason). Then you do a select case to determine which slide the presenter is on, and modify the shapes on that particular slide.
As for interaction with the animation you can add checkboxes, command buttons (to set a string), and you can check to see if the user has moved the mouse to make the mouse cursor visable (ie, to trigger reverse, or to make the animation do a different task with the same shapes). The presenter does not tell if the normal power point animations have been triggered or not (only the current slide that is shown), animation of objects yet to appear with a “normal” animation will still cause the flash but you cannot see anything move until the timer-animated object is made to appear.
enjoy!