Watch PowerPoint in LibreOffice without special effects?

November 18, 2023 1:08 AM

I'm taking an online class and the PowerPoint slides are full of text effects that are...far less charming than whoever made the PowerPoint anticipated. I would like to view the entire slide show without these effects--no text dancing in or rotating as it appears on screen. How do I do this in LibreOffice Impress (or another free viewer)? The "animations allowed" checkbox in slide show settings is not what I want, unfortunately - that is only about the way animated gifs are displayed. I am currently using a Windows 10 computer but can switch to Linux Mint if necessary.
posted by needs more cowbell to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: If no Libre experts come along with a direct solution, my workaround would be to print to PDF then view the slides in a PDF viewer.
posted by token-ring at 4:20 AM on November 18 [8 favorites]

If the slides are set up with layers of disappearing and appearing text, you may need to manually move each transition on to its own slide. There may be automated ways to do this now.
posted by rockindata at 6:47 AM on November 18

Do you need to actually play the slideshow? If you've got Libre Office, couldn't you just flip through the slides in the editor view? Sure, there's some extra UI cruft visible that you don't care about, but unless the editing experience has drastically changed since I last used it, you should be able to see every slide fully-built with no transitions.
posted by Alterscape at 7:48 AM on November 18 [2 favorites]

Depending on the context, it may be appropriate to ask your instructor if future presentations could be provided without animations since they are causing a "compatibility issue" on your end.

Within Libre Office I would suggest going to file -> export -> and saving as one of three file types (html doc, xhtml, or pdf).

Alternatively if there isn't anything particularity sensitive in these files, I think it's trying one of those online file conversion sites.
posted by oceano at 12:56 PM on November 19

Response by poster: Exporting as pdfs seems like the simplest way to do what I need.

I also realized that if I upload them to Google Drive and view with Google Slides the most obnoxious text effects (each letter rotating individually as a word appears, etc) don't seem to happen, but that's a lot more steps than just exporting to PDF for a less-good result.
posted by needs more cowbell at 2:50 PM on November 19