Sunday, May 08, 2011

Presentation on Netbook?

If you have a Netbook you will no doubt be well aware of it's short comings.
I have an Acer Aspire One, 160 GB hard drive, 2 GB of memory, no problem, it is however the Atom processor that has it's limitations.

I recently wanted to show a LibreOffice Impress presentation on the Netbook, but I ran into all sorts of trouble, in short, it just could not handle it.
If I remove all the animations then it is do-able, but you can see the Netbook struggling to cope, the strain of running an office suite and a large presentation of top of that is a bit beyond this Netbook.

KOffice is an option, but it distorted the presentation and I was not about to rewrite the whole thing on the Netbook in KOffice or any other application.

That is when I stumbled upon this neat trick, doing the presentation from a PDF viewer!

All you need is the default KDE document viewer or Adobe Reader.

Open the presentation in LibreOffice Impress and export it as a PDF file, next, open the exported PDF in your document viewer of choice.

You will see something like this:



Go to View -> Fullscreen. In Adobe Reader the presentation will begin immediately, in KDE document viewer there is one more step:




In KDE document viewer, once you have the file in "Fullscreen" mode, you will see a button in the top right hand corner, "Start a presentation":



That is it, nothing to it!

It works just the same as any normal presentation, mouse click or arrow buttons to navigate and esc to quit, but without the office suite load added to the Netbook.

Granted you cannot do anything fancy with it, but it saved my bacon and it is more compatible between different platforms than even the open document format!

Give it a spin, and if you have more tips or suggestions, let me know!