Specifically, I've got a question about how it handles colours. I haven't ventured to the official OOo mailing lists yet.

OOo has the concept of loadable colour lists. I'm not sure what the intention was, but the effect is that setting the colour of something involves picking a predefined colour from a drop-down list. If you want to pick a specific colour, you can, but by adding one to the list. What I'm guesing is that many people don't know you can load a different colour list (OOo ships with half-a-dozen).

However: this is really quite at odds with how MS Office thinks about colours, particularly in PowerPoint. PowerPoint has long had the idea of a Palette (note that PP doesn't call it that). Every presentation has it's own Palette of 8 colours that are given special names, like Normal Text, Highlight, Background and so on. You can, of course, assign any colour you like to any item, but if you setup your palette and use it consistently, you can make sweeping changes to colour very easily. It's rather like the HTML/CSS idea of assigning a "role" to items and then assigning the colour to the "role".

Many people who use PowerPoint don't understand the Palette and don't use it. But I do, and I use it to great effect with the song files I look after for my church. (I've been using PowerPoint since version 4.)

But OOo doesn't appear to work that way. Loading PP presentations that use a Palette into OOo doesn't lose the Palette's colours, but the Palette itself is "lost". There's no way I can find to duplicate this functionality in OOo. Even OOo's own colour list doesn't work that way. The colour list is not a palette; it's just a list of predefined colours available for assignment.

So my question is: does OOo somehow support PowerPoints' Palette?

Wade.