LibreOffice freezes when opening large .pptx files
Hello Trisquel users,
It has been roughly 6 months since I've installed Trisquel 7.0, and it has been great so far. Everything has worked. However, when I tried to open a large .pptx file yesterday, LibreOffice froze completely. The first 3 slides displayed as loaded, but the rest of the slides were not loaded. Unfortunately, even those 3 slides couldn't be viewed since the program was frozen.
Thankfully, I can open other programs (e.g. Task Manager so that I can kill LibreOffice). I've been looking around the web for information on this problem, and haven't found anything more than to delete the user profile at $HOME/.config/libreoffice/4/user, and open LibreOffice again (which supposedly resets the user profile). I have done that, and the problem persists.
I was running LibreOffice 4.2.x, and this problem was there. I just upgraded to 5.2.4.2 (latest version) an hour back to see if the latest version fixed this problem, but it didn't. In the past, I have opened large .pptx files with lots of images and animations with no issues, so I don't know why this problem suddenly popped up. I have rebooted, and even reinstalled Java/LibreOffice to no avail. I have tried exporting the presentation as a PDF, that results in a freeze as well.
Any of you know how to fix this? I wish I didn't have to deal with PowerPoint files, but that is the format my teachers distribute in. I can't really change that. I do have a Windows machine to view these files, but that would be a last resort. I want to stick to free software such as LibreOffice.
Thanks for reading.
Maybe this would work
"Converting Many Microsoft Office Files into OpenDocument Format
The Document Converter Wizard will copy and convert all Microsoft Office files in a folder into LibreOffice documents in the OpenDocument file format. You can specify the folder to be read, and the folder where the converted files are to be saved.
Choose File - Wizards - Document Converter to start the wizard."
So maybe you can convert the file first to libreoffice format.
from https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Using_Microsoft_Office_and
Thanks, the PowerPoint files were successfully converted into .odp files. Unfortunately, the freeze problem is still there, even when I open the .odp files. So, it looks like this issue affects more than 1 file format. It's not an issue with Microsoft (well, Microsoft has other issues... as we all know).
I'll test this version of LibreOffice and the presentation files on my other GNU/Linux machine. That will tell us whether this is an issue with LibreOffice in general or Trisquel specifically.
Try to have fives minutes of your professor's time and ask him or her to only distribute PDF files. You can show LibreOffice's inability to open the problematic file, explain why you would not use proprietary formats if you were him/her (see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html for some arguments) and propose a free software PDF printer (or do the latest versions of the Office suite now include a export to PDF?).
> or do the latest versions of the Office suite now include a export to PDF?
They do. They also support ODF.
But this doesn't sound to me like a problem with formats. It sounds more like a problem with this particular file. Maybe the file is just so large that it's taking a long time to open? Or maybe there's something about it that LibreOffice doesn't expect? Or maybe you're running out of RAM and going into swap? Hard to say without seeing the file.