OpenOffice 3.0 - Presenter Screen

Hey guys/gals,

At our church, we have the issue that our pastor and those visiting pastors love to use "Powerpoint" slides. For the last two years, we have used OpenOffice as our method of handling this. At our church, we do not have M$ Office loaded on any machines. As we have purchased new computers, I have trained and equipped our staff with OpenOffice.

In fact, this has been our only real disappointment with openlp - that we cannot use the "Powerpoint" integration because we do not have M$ Powerpoint. However, we are tickled to death to know that that is in progress. Raoul, Derek and the other members of the openlp team have been churning out a top-of-the-class product! We have full faith that they will do wonders with openlp in the months and years ahead.

Anyways, I am rambling now. What I have been wishing for in OpenOffice is the familiar "Presenter Screen" from M$ Office Powerpoint. If you have used OpenOffice Impress in your services, then you are all too familiar with the fact that there is no display for the Presenter to use while showing the slide show to the audience. Well, that all changes in OpenOffice 3.0. If you haven't been following the OpenOffice roadmap or features list, let me send you off to a bit of happy news:

Presenter Blog:

http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/presenter_screen?intcmp=1550

Presenter Screen Wiki:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Presenter_Screen

All I can say is, I am in the process of downloading the OpenOffice 3.0 Beta and the Presenter Screen Extension Developers Release.

I am left with only one real curiosity... will this extension and feature help simplify the process for openlp -> OpenOffice integration. Who knows.

Enjoy,

Kevin L.