Hi I’m new to Impress and I’m preparing for a big talk in a weeks time. I’ve used Keynote and Google Slides in the past but have chosen Impress because I run Linux on my laptop and I dislike MacOS (Keynote is fantastic however) and don’t want to travel with 2 machines just for the purposes of presentation.
The fact that Google Slides presentations require an internet connection for video playback is a MASSIVE black mark again that option.
So far I’ve been really enjoying Impress, seems a little bit quirky in places but I’ve learned to adapt to and live with those quirks. However, there are some things that are just straight up frustrating and I’m hoping there are solutions for.
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When I place an image in a slide that is larger than the slide boundary I can no longer see the border guide and have to build my own for this purpose.
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When I place a logo in the corner in front of fullscreen video, it’s displayed correctly in edit mode but always behind when presenting. Ideally I wouldn’t even have to do this at all and there would be an “always in front” option for objects in master slides. On slides with full-frame images I’ve had to paste in an identical copy of what I already have in my master slide and send it to front (which doesn’t work for videos as I mentioned above)
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The media playback options for videos are… primitive. To say the least.
- I can make videos loop (plus point over Google Slides which makes you do it once it’s playing), make them muted and make them start at a specific frame.
- I can’t specify an end frame, or control autoplay (without using the double-animation-effect hack)
- There are no playback controls on the video if I want to pause/scrub a video to explain things while presenting.
- I can’t resize/arrange the panes in the presenter view.
Any suggestions that might alleviate these gripes welcome!