The perfect presentation - graphics software for business presentations - includes related article on high-end programs

Nation's Business, Sept, 1995 by Joseph F. Schuler, Jr.

Aperfect presentation means different things to different people.

For most small-business owners, a perfect presentation is one that is prepared quickly, fits into a briefcase, and still has impact. That could mean wowing 100 people, winning a $400,000 bid, or simply keeping three vice presidents transfixed by overhead charts.

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Time also is a major concern for small-business people. The deadline for a big presentation could be in a day, an hour, now.

At PES Environmental Inc., an environmental consulting firm in Novato, Calif., Geoff Laughton, the firm's operations manager, only had part of a workday to develop a graphic that might help colleagues win a contract from a big corporation. Laughton bought a mass-market graphics package called ClarisImpact at a software store and loaded the program into his Macintosh computer.

Although he had never used a drawing or presentation-graphics program, Laughton says, he prepared and printed the required chart "in probably an hour and a half, two hours."

The graphic wasn't elaborate, he says, but it complemented the company's overall presentation, most of which had been prepared by a PES artist too swamped to take on more work. "To be able to have a person like myself, ignorant about that type of package, be able to load it up and get anything out of it in half a day ... is a miracle," Laughton says.

Potential users of the full-featured presentation packages typically need an artistic bent, a patient teacher, or both to master tham. In part, that is because such software offers a dizzying array of output format options, including slide shows, full-motion video, animation effects, and more. Although these high-end presentation-graphics packages fit the bill for many businesses, simpler software often can do the job.

The program Laughton pulled off the shelf wasn't an all-inclusive presentation package. It was among the new breed of simple, "intuitive" business-graphics or diagramming programs that sacrifice some high-end features for ease of use and low cost.

This software, aimed at the small-business and home markets, employs sensible commands and clear interfaces. And it's "smart." For example, the software can deduce when you want a straight or a curved line as you draw it. Most of this software works in concert with familiar programs, such as Microsoft's Windows operating environment, and it requires less computer memory and disk space than the high-end packages.

Acceptance of this simpler presentation software has been astounding.

Shapeware Corp. pioneered the niche, debuting Visio in November 1992 and shipping 95,000 boxes the following year. In 1993, new products like CorelFlow, ClarisImpact, and ABC SnapGraphics boosted the category's unit sales to 329,000.

Although sales figures for 1994 have not been fully compiled, it is estimated that about 823,000 business-diagramming products flooded the market that year, according to Joan-Carol Brigham, a senior analyst at International Data Corp. (IDC), a technology market research firm in Framingham, Mass. And many of those sales were to small-business users.

A larger business sometimes has a creative-services department that does presentations. "Someone puts something on a napkin and sends it to creative services, and an artist draws it, and it looks great," says Mel Badgett, graphics-products director of Claris Corp., in Santa Clara, Calif. A lot of products coming onto the market, Badgett says, make it easier for the small business to get the same results with less effort.

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Three products in the business-graphics category are frequently mentioned by small-business users as being reasonably priced and requiring only a 20-minute learning curve.

And for a nongraphics person who could barely crayon within the lines as a child, these packages are fun, and that could make putting a chart together on deadline all the more palatable.

The products are ClarisImpact, Visio, and ABC SnapGraphics.

ClarisImpact ($149 suggested retail price), by Claris Corp., is available for both the Macintosh and Windows operating systems.

Visio ($199 retail), by Shapeware Corp. of Seattle, is a Windows-based program.

ABC SnapGraphics ($99 retail), by Micrografx Inc. of Richardson, Texas, also works under Windows.

All three packages work similarly: You call up a template, click the mouse, drag a shape/line/connector to your work area, size the shape, choose colors and fonts, repeat the process a few times, and you're practically done.

Both SnapGraphics and Visio have features that allow drawings to be inserted directly into presentations without tedious conversions, and you can edit the drawings once they are in place.

For art dummies, ClarisImpact seems particularly easy to use. It prompts users step by step through the creation of a slide show, providing a professional-looking menu of master styles from which to choose. (The same feature can be used to make overheads and 35 mm slides by transferring the files to a disk and taking the disk to a slide-processing company.)