presentation programs

Home Office Computing, Dec, 1999 by Susan Glinert

Give your ideas the eye-popping treatment they deserve with one of these professional packages

WANT TO GET YOUR MESSAGE across to a large audience? Need to impress a client with your portfolio or sales pitch? Armed with presentation software and a little imagination, you can produce a professional-looking slide show, complete with attractive transitions, sound effects, videoclips, and even voice-over commentary.

We took a look at five leading Windows presentation software packages, and discovered that all of them work in similar ways: You first select a template design containing the background colors, fonts, and graphics that will set the tone of your presentation. Many let you start with a canned presentation, containing boilerplate text for everything from a business plan to a corporate overview.

Next, you can organize your thoughts or bullet points by using a program's outline view. You're then free to fine-tune each slide--adding graphics, charts, animation, and multimedia effects--in the program's one-slide-at-a-time view.

Once your slides are complete, you use a sorter view to preview them as thumbnails and rearrange them as you see fit. All of the applications here offer the chance to preview your slide show and rehearse your timing at any step of the process.

Aside from their different templates and clip art, the programs vary mainly in their distribution and Internet conveniences. Although each program can package a presentation with a runtime player so it will run as a stand-alone application, Astound and Microsoft PowerPoint also support interactive Internet shows--helpful when you can't present in person. (See this month's Can Do section for a step-by-step guide to creating online presentations.) Corel Presentations, for its part, can export your slides as Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files--great for distribution on a CD.

Lotus Freelance leans toward sophisticated network collaboration, so you can present a show simultaneously to everyone at the corporate office (provided, of course, they're using Lotus SmartSuite). And with the exception of Harvard Graphics, all of these programs can mutate your slides into Web pages, so you can post the show on a Web site.

Another point of variability is the quality of templates and drawing tools. The artistically disadvantaged should look closely at PowerPoint, which has the classiest clip art and the widest selection of attractive templates. Perhaps drawing on some CorelDraw DNA, Corel Presentations has the strongest drawing tools in the roundup. Astound and Harvard Graphics include utilities for creating interesting text effects, and Freelance offers excellent diagramming capability.

As potent as these presentation tools are, they can't turn a weak message into a memorable one. Keep each slide short--no more than three or four points--and always favor content over spinning globes and bouncing text. Even when it comes to PC presentations, you don't want your medium to overcome your message.

Astound 6

The winning entry when it comes to creating presentations with animation and multimedia effects, Astound 6 ($395) comes with more than 100 gorgeous template styles, an excellent bundled program for creating animated 3D text, and a spectacular library of sound and videoclips and photos. Oddly, the package offers only 10 canned presentations--a minus for busy home-based workers who need professional slides in a hurry.

Although Astound isn't difficult to learn, the absence of online tutorials or helpful onscreen walk-throughs makes the program harder to master than it should be. The documentation is silent about some features, including the 3D text utility; the display isn't customizable, and lacks pop-up tool tips. A status bar on the bottom of the screen provides minimal feedback about the current task.

But what Astound lacks in ease-of-use niceties, it makes up for in multimedia. You can drop sophisticated effects onto slides using simple toolbar buttons. In addition, you'll find support for the latest Web multimedia formats, such as PNG, MP3, and RealMedia G2 files.

Astound's sophisticated Web features make it a good choice if you're planning an Internet presentation. As with PowerPoint, you can preview slides in your browser, but Astound also lets you add Java applets and other Internet components, such as ActiveX controls and Visual Basic scripts. When you want to distribute your presentation, the included Web Conference Publisher automatically converts presentations into either static or dynamic HTML and immediately posts them to the Web. Web conferences can be played back in any Java-enabled browser.

Despite its meager documentation and ho-hum interface, we were wowed by Astound's capabilities. If you relish assembling complex animations and adding cool special effects to presentations--and don't mind the price and the learning curve--this is the program for you.

Corel Presentations 2000

Corel has incorporated first-rate drawing and image editing tools into Presentations 2000 ($300 as part of WordPerfect Office 2000 Standard Edition). The suite ships with an extensive library of fonts and clip art, making it one of the most complete presentation packages on the market.