Presentations

What works

­­File menu (with enhanced file dialogues disabled)

New - New From Project - Close - Save - Save As
Page Setup - Print - Internet Publisher - Publish to PDF
Recent File List
Exit

Edit menu

Undo - Redo
Cut - Copy - Paste
Delete - Delete Slide(s) - Delete Layout - Delete Background - Rename Layout - Rename Background - Clear
Edit Text - Select - Arrange
Slide Layer - Layout Layer - Background Layer
Find and Replace - Go To List

View menu

Play Slide Show
Toolbars - Ruler - Grid/Guides/Snap
Crosshair - Selected Object Viewer - Show Pointer - Reveal Codes
Slide Editor - Slide Outliner - Slide Sorter
Zoom - Zoom In - Zoom Out

Insert menu

Symbol - Date/Time
Graphics (Clipart) - Data Chart - Organization Chart

Bulleted List
New Slide - New Layout - New Background

Format menu

Font - Line - Paragraph - Justification - Manual Kerning
Master Gallery - Re-Apply Layout

Tools menu

Spell Checker - Grammatik - Thesaurus - Dictionary
QuickCorrect

Window menu

Cascade - Tile Top to Bottom - Tile Side by Side
Windows List

Help menu

About Corel Presentations

What does not

File menu (with enhanced file dialogues enabled)

Open - Save As
­Properties
Send To [crash]

Edit menu

Paste Special

Insert menu

Graphics (TextArt etc) - Shape - Text Box - Text Line
Comment - Equation - Sound - Movie - Animated Gif - Spreadsheet - File - Object

Format menu

Title Properties - Subtitle Properties

Tools menu

Settings

Help menu

Help Topics - Macro Commands - PerfectExpert - Corel Connector - Corel on the Web
Microsoft PowerPoint Help

Workarounds

What was not tested

File menu

Show on the Go

Edit menu

Edit Group

Links - OLE Play Settings

View menu

Play Movie

Auto Select

Format menu

Bulleted List Properties - Object Properties - Slide Properties
Movie Properties

Background Gallery - Layout Gallery

Tools menu

Macro - Visual Basic
Trace Text - Trace Bitmap - Convert to Bitmap - Resample Bitmap
Image Tools - Blend - Quick3-D - QuickWarp - Contour Text - Convert to Polygon
Custom Audiences - SpeedLink List

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

The menus change with context. Not all were tried. All drawing functions seemed inactive. Editing of data and organisation charts was not attempted. Opening of documents in Microsoft PowerPoint format did not seem reliable. Saving such documents even less so. Maybe OK for simple presentations but too much does not work and too much crashes for any serious use.

It is recommend you avoid all Property, Gallery and Settings pop-up windows.

Tabbed pop-up windows are dangerous. Generally, the tabs will be unlabelled or the label will be gibberish. Selecting a tab is more than likely to crash Presentations. It can even happen that no tabs are displayed and the crash is immediate.

By default, Corel Presentations uses 'enhanced' (Explorer-like) file dialogues. These do not work under Wine. Presentations will probably crash or hang opening an existing slide show or saving a new one unless the enhanced dialogues are disabled first.

Start Presentations. Select Settings... under the Tools menu. Select Environment > Options. Uncheck the "Use enhanced file dialogs" box. Click OK. Click Close.

The Tools > Settings pop-up window crashes so it is not possible to disable enhanced file dialogues from within Presentations. However, disabling enhanced file dialogues in WordPerfect also disables enhanced file dialogues in Presentations. See the guidance notes for WordPerfect 10.

The File > Open dialogue is unreliable. When the Open button is pressed, the button text may change to Save and a pop-up asks kindly if you wish to overwrite the document you are trying to open.

Open documents by some other means - the Recent File List and Perfect Expert work well for documents that have been opened before. To open an old document for the first time, use a console window, start Presentations from the command line giving the document's path as an argument.

Unfortunately, some of the Import menu options use the same dialogue windows as Open > File and these too are broken.

File > Save works once. Do not expect to be able to save a given document a second time.

For the save of a new document, your chances of success are greater if you use File > Save As instead of File > Save.

File > Save As (or File > Save of a new document) presents a dialogue window with a drop-down list that allow you to select the format in which the document is to be saved.

This list may be empty. All documents saved so far in these circumstances have been corrupt beyond further use. Cancelling the dialogue and trying again has been known to work. Specifying a file type (extension) along with the file name, for example test.shw instead of just test, has also been known to work.

The horizontal and vertical toolbars (the Property Bar, Application Bar and Drawing Palette) appear not to be displayed. They are, but their height is too small to notice.

The tool bars can be restored to health by deleting corrupt entries from the Wine registry. These entries must be deleted beforehand each time Presentations is started. The following shell script should do the trick:

#!/bin/sh
ver=10;
cpc="Software\\Corel\\Corel Presentations\\${ver}\\Customize";
root="HKEY_CURRENT_USER";
wine regedit /D "${root}\\${cpc}\\Property Bar";
wine regedit /D "${root}\\${cpc}\\Tool Palette";
wine regedit /D "${root}\\${cpc}\\Toolbar";
exit;

The drawing functions do not work.

Try View > Show Pointer Position. The pointer position is displayed in the bottom left-hand corner of the window. This shows 0cm,0cm for all positions within the window. The drawing canvas is a singularity.

Corel Presentations should be able to open and save Microsoft PowerPoint format slide shows. However, this is less an open/save operation pair and more an import/export operation pair.

Open of and save as slide shows in PowerPoint format is problematic under Wine. The one and only attempt so far to import a PowerPoint presentation resulted in a slide show with the correct number of slides, each with the right header but with no bullet lists.