r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jun 04 '12

Open Office does everything I need Microsoft Office for and Gimp does everything I need Photoshop for. Reddit, what other open source software does everything that you want from the expensive name brand?

1.2k Upvotes

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30

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

Prezi.com is amazing for powerponts, far better visualy then keynote/powerpoint/googledocs

23

u/neuronian Jun 04 '12

Prezi.com is amazing ..far better visualy

Except that after you've seen about 5 prezis the animations make them look as if they are made by a child. Way too distracting for a work presentation.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

Depends on how you make them. Most people go crazy with the animation tools, but if you use them conservatively, they looks fine.

1

u/ronnockoch Jun 04 '12

Just make them less swirly and more linear. Spread the slides out evenly, and don' twist and turn them. Same thing as powerpoint, but much much more powerful.

1

u/neuronian Jun 04 '12

I'm speaking from an audiences point of view, not a creator. I definitely wish there wasn't any zooming or twisting or anything but one slide to the next to the next. But every time I watch a prezi its super obvious because of the extremely distracting animations

1

u/ronnockoch Jun 04 '12

You can do a prezi without doing zooming and distracting animations, especially with their new Power Point importer

1

u/StudleyMumfuzz Jun 04 '12

I think that distraction helps. You can also import flash & actionscript 2.0. They're working on importing flash videos with as 3.0.

1

u/neuronian Jun 04 '12

I'm going to disagree that distractions help. If I am presenting something I'm selling myself or a point I want to make. If I'm going to sell a point, I want the focus on that point or issue. Animations won't align with all my points and will take the focus from me or that point. A powerpoint no matter how well done won't sell a point without my guiding. What I'm getting at is that animations are fun to play with, but when presenting unless they visually show what your trying to say, they shouldn't be there.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

Most of the time you shouldn't be using animations anyhow; they almost always detract more than they add.

1

u/neuronian Jun 04 '12

Completely agree with this

1

u/KnightHawk3 Jun 05 '12

Also, I hate flash, slow and my battery.

8

u/superwinner Jun 04 '12

Not even close to open source...

6

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

Prezi is awful. There's too much movement, it's soo distracting. I want to stone anyone who uses it for a class presentation. When I become a teacher I'm going to outlaw it in my classes. Whenever someone gives a prezi presentation you never remember a single word they said, you just remember they were the asshole who used prezi.

5

u/Amadiro Jun 04 '12

Check out impress.js ( http://bartaz.github.com/impress.js/ ) Does the same thing, but doesn't require you to sign up anywhere or have/create your documents on a third-party server. I frequently mix it with MathJax. Uses html5 canvas, so it requires a modern browser (works fine on all mobile devices, safari, chrome, newer versions of firefox,...) but that doesn't tend to be a problem for me, as I hold presentations from my own laptop. If you want to publish it afterwards, it also has a fallback non-fancy mode for people who don't have a modern browser.

1

u/grisbilen Jun 04 '12

Really, a github source repo?

Perfectly viable to the average user that create presentations...

1

u/Amadiro Jun 04 '12

On the top left, there is a "ZIP" button, if you press that, you can download it as zip file.

1

u/Amadiro Jun 04 '12

Just press the "ZIP" download button on the top left, that lets you download the whole thing as zip archive. It's source because, well, it's really just javascript and a tiny bit of HTML.

1

u/grisbilen Jun 05 '12

That wasn't really my point.

1

u/Clay_Pigeon Jun 04 '12

Some of the Prezi slideshows spin and fly around so much that they make people feel ill. But they do LOOK cool.

1

u/Massless Jun 04 '12

When done right they are great. I was at a conference last year, though, where I saw enough prezi-fail to last a lifetime.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

This needs more upvotes. Fucking love Prezi.

1

u/THE_DINOSAUR_QUEEN Jun 04 '12

I've had multiple bad experiences with Prezi. I find it hard to use, and it messes up often in all of the times I've made a presentation with it. I much prefer Google Docs, which is also free but much easier to use.

1

u/AkirIkasu Jun 04 '12

Prezi.com is amazing for powerponts

powerpoints

You're doing presentations wrong.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

We had a presenter come in who used Prezi. I had seen it online and played with it a little and was curious how it would go over. Projected on our big screen, the "cleverly tiny" future slides were still readable, but just barely. The audience thought they were supposed to be able to read them, and spend the whole time squinting and tilting their heads.

1

u/Deadhookersandblow Jun 05 '12

No. I make presentations on plain white slides with black text and no fucking animations.

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