Rohan Walsh rohan_walsh@yahoo.com.au wrote:
hate to admit I did this but... You can install MS powerpoint viewer using wine http://winehq.org/site/download-rh and winetools http://www.von-thadden.de/Joachim/WineTools/ Any licencing issues are your responsibility of course. I only did it out of curiosity because I needed wine for another app, so I haven't used it but once to see if it worked (it did) and don't actually have wine installed at the moment.
Herein lies the problem.
Because the original poster used the terminology Power Point (IMPROPER generic term) Viewer, you assumed he wanted a viewer for the actual Microsoft Power Point(R) (proper name) application.
In fact, when I first read his post, I _did_ come to the _same_ initial conclusion as well!
But I was left partially confused and finally realized what he meant was he wanted a Presentation (generic term) Viewer for Star[Office]/Open[Office.org]Impress, which he had incorrectly called a Power Point (IMPROPER generic term) Viewer.
Which is the ultimate problem I predicted, regularly run into and, in fact, is what we have here.
Microsoft is smart, I mean really smart, because they do not tolerate anything, any partner, any entity, anyone to call things anything but Windows, Office, Word, Power Point, etc... They excel so much on branding, and the use of simple names that they have branded their names as generics in a handful of years, instead of the decades it took 3M to do for Scotch Tape, Johnson&Johnson for Q-Tip, etc...
When you use a Windows system, you know it. But many people use Linux systems daily, and don't know it. In fact, most large volume Microsoft licensing agreements require licensees to display and market Windows, Office and other trademarks more than your own.
As I always say, "How do you know something runs Linux? You don't, because there is no requirement that you market it. How do you know something runs Windows? Because it's in larger print than the vendor's own product name."
"You now are now free to bitch-smack around the country."