Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 72220
Write protection on presentation
Last modified: 2013-02-07 22:41:33 UTC
I am using OO Impress to prepare multimedia presentations for open-distance learning. However I need my students to watch the content of such presentations without being able to modify, edit, reuse and resave all or parts of them. Since, as far as I know, there is no way to save an Impress file with the ability to prevent others to edit it if not authorized, I cannot just publish the Impress files, and I have to implement a long and tiresome process of conversion into an AVI video of their content. If I were able to set a password protection not for opening the doc, but for editing it, I could avoid this with many benefits: - much much less heavy files to download for the students (some of them have serious difficulties to download very large files); - no more hard work to get an AVI from an Impress files - as far as I know there is no way to do it directly; an extension that could export impress files into AVI format would be a GREAT one anyway; - last but not least, a huge promotion boost for OO: now my students do not even know I am using Impress to prepare their lectures: they just get some AVIs... If I could send them the Impress files, they would all get OO try and use it, getting to know and maybe like it! By the way MS Office Powerpoint docs do have such edit protection feature. So, IMHO the little effort needed would be hugely justified in usability gains for Impress docs. Thanks for the attention
Setting the file properties to "read-only" lets me open it in read only mode. Maybe a workaround... Reassigned.
Ehm, actually I do not understand what you mean..... the read-only attribute of a file cannotbe password-protected..... any user could go change the attribute.... unless he doesn't have a clue on file attributes.... but I suppose you did not mean this... so if you know a way to password-protect the read-only attribute, please let me know. I must say however that this would be a quite flimsy protection: unless you have also a copy-paste protection, it wopuld be easy to re-create the file or any part and save it with another name.... I am afraid that the only serious thing to do is to have a real option to password-protect the edititng of a file from inside the application. Thanks for the attention
That's exactly what would be a valuable option!