how to import animated gifs, slide movement and slide grouping

[kalika]

Hi Alain,

I recently bought your program and i’m trying to sketch up a spectacular presentation, at least as spectacular as possible…
The program has some spectacular features that we cannot find elsewhere, that’s true, but now that i’m trying to go a little further and achieve more complex results with my slide presentations i’ve found some things that are very annoying and some questions arose.

1. How can we import animated gifs onto my slides? I’ve tried just to import them as i do with any other picture but they remain still. That doesn’t work.
I tried a way around, repeating a slide for each animation frame. That worked but that’s a lot of work and i cannot grab the slides to group them to copy and paste them freely whenever i need to repeat the animation. And there is also the split-second blank screen effect between each frame of the animation.

2. Why can’t we move freely the slides in the “slide selection panel”? There’s only the option to “move slide up” or “move slide down”.
It should be possible to move the slides freely in the slide selection panel, forward and backwards as we wish to fulfil our needs. I really needed to be able to group some slides to move them around and to copy and paste them into different time points of the presentation.

3. How can we preview a group of slides?
We should have a way to preview some selected slides, from 5 to 15 in a group of 30 for instance, to see how they transit from one to another, and to see how the animations worked out, but the program only allows us to see the preview of the slide we’re working on or the entire presentation.

4. It should be possible to have two or more Slide Effect documents opened at the same time so we could copy and paste slides or a slide group from one to the other (or simply drag them, similarly to what we can do in design softwares like photoshop)

Could you fix these? Or tell if there’s any way around to get things done that i couldn’t think of? I’m sure i’m not the only one with these questions and i think everybody would be thankful if you could fix them or propose a way around.
It would be great if all these little things could be solved otherwise i can’t use the program as i thought i could, to make really, really, spectacular presentations…

Best regards

Kalika

[alain]

Hi Kalika,

First, thanks for this detailed feedback: I really appreciate to have feedbacks from real users, it is always useful for me.

Now, let’s go back to your points:

1. Animated Gifs

Yes, this is not supported yet. I will add it on a future release. In the meantime, the workaround is to use a converter to transform your gif to an avi file (you can do that using Windows Movie Maker).

2. Move freely slides on the sidebar

You are right, the actual way of doing this (“move slide up/down”) is not very intuitive. I will definitly enhance that part.

3. Preview part of the presentation

Sure, it would be an interesting feature. I may change the preview behaviour to start in the current slide but go until the end of the presentation. That’s a good suggestion and I will add that feature asap.

4. Open two sef documents and copy/paste

Yes, that’s a known problem. This one is not that easy to resolve, so I won’t say it will be resolved in the next version, but it is also on my todo list.

The upcoming pro version with the Powerpoint import/export will help on this area but I agree I have to enhance that.

As a conclusion, I agree with you about these limitations, and I am well aware of them, I try to enhance the user interface on each version and I will try to address these points in the short term. But as I am only one developer for now, it takes a bit more time than on a “big” company.

Thanks again for your feedback, I will keep you informed about the new features in this area.

Alain

[Author]

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