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Next week, I am heading to a conference on medical informatics in #Sydney, one of the largest such gatherings. The organisers insisted that I send my presentation slide deck as Powerpoint slides despite my repeated requests that I only use #Foss tools in principle. Then I discovered they have several sessions on #OpenSource software. Wonder the session leaders will fire up their “Powerpoint” slide decks to lecture the plebs on Open source (sigh!)

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Nope, not even PDFs. Either PPTx or not. Guess I will find out when I go there next week as to what arrangement they have that ONLY allows powerpoints to be shown and nothing else!

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@arinbasu1

LibreOffice supports pptx.

If you have to use a specific Microsoft PowerPoint template, then some luck is required to smoothly import the template in LibreOffice.

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Yes I know. Google Slides supports PPTx as well, as does OpenOffice, OnlyOffice, and so on. I was intrigued if not annoyed at the irony of it that people have to speak about #FOSS at a conference with nothing but a proprietary format of a document whose parent company is an epitome of everything non-free and #EEE in the space.

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@arinbasu1 yes. The problem is Microsoft and their horrible OOXML formats. I have nothing good to say about such a horrible corporation, which does everything possible to encourage the corruption of people with better values (e.g. though sponsorship of such conferences). @srijit

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@arinbasu1 that really sucks. I've publicly taken conference organisers to task for doing that in the past. Quite a shit policy. At the very least they should allow HTML or PDF presentations. If they're running a tech-focused conference, they have no business doing so if they can offer that flexibility. Credibility lost. @lf_araujo

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Well, I offered them to do an html presentation (like a w3 css, or revealjs, and so on …) but they would have none of it, see the screenshot. Apparently it is not the conference organisers themselves who are adamant but the event management company they outsourced the speaking management.

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