Is Impress the Wrong Program to Make Storybooks?

System is currently running Widows 10 (due to BIOS support issues.) AMD Ryzen 5 2500U, Radeon Vega Mobile 2000 Mhz; 8GB RAM

Using LO 7.1.2

I’ve been using presentation apps for a few years to create stories for teaching. I started with G Slides & upgraded to LO Impress last year. The stories are like illustrated story books and are semi-animated, but I seem to have hit the limit of what I can do even with Impress. For graphic elements in the stories, I use vector images (svg), Fontwork, and gif’s with an occasional embedded video. Text is also animated to appear, and may do so by the word or letter depending on student level. It has worked great, though, because I can give students a little bit of information to focus and work with at a time and can set it up to repeat animations to emphasize actions, etc.

The latest project is very graphic heavy. It was around 100 graphic elements and 150 animations per slide when I switched from G Slides. I am running into a lot of issues including lagging, hanging for extended periods while saving, and frequent crashes with Impress, and I’m only using about 20 animations per slide at the moment.

I reduced the Undo function from 100 actions to 20, as recommended in another post here. I also changed the priority (through Task Manager) from normal to high. Both of those helped, but have not ended the crashes and lags.

-Not trying to demean Impress here. I do like the program but think I may have hit the physical limits of the program. I like how I can put these learning stories together with a minimum of hassle.

Is there a way to fix this, or have I hit the limit on Impress’s abilities?

If I’ve hit the limit, I’d appreciate recommendations for a different program. (And realize that people here aren’t likely to be familiar with programs outside LO). I like how the slides in Impress correlate to pages in a book and I can use the animation clicks to work through the story as quickly or slowly as the students need. My goal is to make semi-animated stories and not animated movies.

Is there a way to fix this, or have I hit the limit on Impress’s abilities?

That is only difficult to answer. Of course, every system and every program has its limits somewhere.


But the question must also be the other way around: What hardware do you have, processor, main memory, graphics card? Yes, I read it, it doesn't make a usable statement for me yet. Have you checked your task manager to see what other programs are running at the same time?
You could test it a bit. You would have to provide an Impress file (upload here). It should be a file that takes a long time to run. Enter the corresponding key data.

So others can test with their hardware and announce the result here.


To upload, "Edit" your entry question and use the paperclip icon. Thank you.

Hello Ebot,

Under Task Manager, I experience the same issues whether I have several other programs open or only a couple. (I’ve been watching it a lot to see if I can find the problem.) I’m currently running Firefox (810 mb memory), Foxit Reader (6 mb) & LO Impress (which I’ve seen range from about 300 mb to 600 mb). When LO is processing, it will use up to 35% of the CPU resources. When it is lagging or in a crash cycle, it typically uses under 10%.

I’m sorry that I didn’t give you useful PC stats. Could you tell me which hardware stats you need?

I’m hitting a snag trying to upload a file. I made a new Impress doc and copied 3 slides into it. It is 9.6 mb, but I keep getting an error that the file size is too large. The error message shows that the file size limit is about 1Gb, so I’m not sure what is going on. I tried to upload it to Google Drive, but G Drive won’t make a link to share it.

I kind of feel like I’m banging my head against a wall.

Hello Ebot,

Apologies for not giving useful system info. If you let me know what info you need, I can grab it, or you can check the spec sheet below.

I’ve been watching Task Manager already. There is, maybe, a small difference in performance when I have several programs open, or just a few. Currently, I have Firefox (810 Mb memory), Foxit (50 Mb), and LO Impress which ranges between 300 - 600 Mb. Impress’s CPU usage ranges between 5% to about 30%, from what I’ve observed.

Most of the lagging/crashes occur when I adjust animation settings. It’s really bad when adjusting settings for gif’s but still problematic for svg’s & other graphic elements. I pushed Impress to crashing, but see no difference in CPU or memory usage during crashes.

I’m hitting a snag when I try to upload a file. I copied 3 slides from the crashing file to a demo to upload. The file is 9.6 mb, but I keep getting a message that it exceeds file size limit of 1 Gb? I even uploaded it to Google Drive and was going to link the file that way, but G Drive won’t generate a link for it! (I did this in 2 separate accounts and had the same problem in each account.) I will try to upload the demo file again after this reply. I feel like I’m hitting my head against the wall here.

I do really appreciate your help. Thank you.

Still getting the same error message when I try to upload a file.

Should I uninstall & try LO 7.0.6?

Perhaps 8Gb RAM is not enough? Graphics heavy processing can easily demand more. Then, check if your filesystem supports more than 2Gb (e.g. FAT has 2Gb limit, if I recall correctly).

This is a very interesting idea, Sveinki!

I checked, and it’s running NTFS, so it’s probably not the file system? (I think, but I’m no expert.)

However, when watching the task manager, I noticed that the graphics card rarely engages. Is there a way to direct the graphics card to process more? Would that be something I could do through LO, or would I have to go through Widows? If Widows, what would be the keywords I need to research to know how to adjust it?

Thank you very much for you comment.

I took me a bit to find that one doesn’t just set the GPU to high. After going through several guides, it appears that I will need to overclock my CPU in order to allow the GPU to take on more processing. (I haven’t overclocked in over a decade. Ugh.)

Thank you everyone for your ideas.

Yes, an old plow horse is not a race horse.