Much though I hate to say it, as a committed LO user for many years, the new Smart Art in MS Powerpoint is really very good indeed. Having seen expert people use it, it is a complete game-changer for the way and speed with which presentations are made.
I want to help my company switch to LO, but we (all 8000 of us) are going to find the lack of Smart Art (or equivalent feature) is a blocker - perhaps the only blocker at present. This is actually 2 things:
(a) LO doesn’t have a GUI tool for creating and experimenting with SmartArt. (I am aware of the smart art extension, but it isn’t in the same league).
(b) LO (even version 5.01) can’t really open Powerpoint files that include SmartArt (yes, it can render them almost adequately in the editor mode, but in presentation mode, we get lots of black boxes, and the smart art objects are nearly impossible to actually edit, because the internal scripting of the smart-art is imperfectly parsed)
What I am suggesting is that this feature might take a man year to implement, but it is really important. Could we have a bug-bounty or a kickstarter for it? I’d certainly put in £500, and I’d bet many others would as well.
Thank you very much for your time and effort.