Razzle-dazzle desktop presentations - Software Review - Lotus Development Corp.'s Freelance Graphics for Windows 2.01; Software Publishing Corp.'s Harvard Graphics 2.0 for Windows; Microsoft Corp.'s PowerPoint for Windows 3.0 - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Nov, 1993 by Kathleen Caster

THREE WINDOWS

PRESENTATIONS GRAPHICS

PACKAGES THAT WILL

MAKE YOUR POINT

Presentation graphics software has evolved to the stage where even a computer novice can create an effective and artistic presentation in a few hours. These programs offer an extensive lineup of charts, tables, text effects, colors, clip art, graphics, and slide transition effects. The presentations they help you to produce can be printed, converted to 35mm slides and overhead transparencies, ar run directly from a PC.

A quick ramp-up time is essential to the success of any presentation product, as the typical person who uses such software is usually a first-time buyer looking to perform an overnight miracle. Even those who are familiar with such packages often use them infrequently: Unlike your word processor or spreadsheet, presentation software is not something you use every day, so getting up to speed quickly is to success. Consequently, these programs are designed to be straightforward and inviting. They offer outlines and templates, consistent background opinions for charts and graphs, and thumbnail views of your presentation. Tutorials and advisers supply detailed information about each step of the process, spreeding you through seemingly complicated tasks.

For this review, we'll look at three major players in the windows-based presentation graphics arena: Lotus Freelance Graphics for Windows 2.01, Harvard Graphics 2.0 for Windows, and Microsoft Power Point for Windows 3.0. PowerPoint with its roots on the Macintosh platform-virtually defined the desktop presentation marked and is one of the most popular presentation software packages available. But Freelance Graphics and Harvard Graphics are serious challengers for the lead in the Windows marketplace, combining the best features of the aging PowerPoint with their own advancements in charting facilities and online tutorials. Both Freelance Graphics and PowerPoint list for $495, whereas Harvard Graphics is listed at $395.

In order to help you determine which package best suits your needs, we evaluated each in the six areas that typify the steps involved in the process of creating a presentation: file importing; slide creation and effects; text, graphs, and tables; drawing capabilities; interface, help, tutorials, and support; and output opinions.

FILE IMPORTING

If you are new to presentations, you might think it's difficult to come up with an impressive slide show. Not so. With desktop presentation graphics packages, it's simply a matter of filling in the blanks: You enter the material for each slide (by importing a word processing outline or typing directly in a text box); add, delete, or move slides to get your material into the proper presentation order; and press an icon or select an item on the menu to run your slide show.

Importing text and spreadsheet data into each package was a relatively simple procedure (for our evaluation, we used Word for Windows 2.0, Excel 4.0, and Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows, release 4). Harvard Graphics imported text only in ASCII format, but had no problem with Excel's XLS or 1-2-3's WK* file formats; Freelance Graphics imported word processing and spreadsheet files with ease and offered a great deal of flexibility in its dialog boxes, providing more predefined file types; PowerPoint, however, did require a few extra steps to format the imported data-particularly spreadsheet files-which are imported directly into the program's Graph module.

SLIDE CREATION AND EFFECTS

You will also want your slides to be eyecatching, so a wide variety of slide design options is crucial. All three packages have slide masters that let you apply one consistent interface-with color scales and ornaments like boxes, lines, countries, landscapes--to all or a selected number of slides.

Freelance Graphics and Harvard Graphics provide you with an automatic dialog box each time you add a slide; this dialog box asks you to select the type of slide you want to create (title page, chart, bulleted text, chart with bullets, table, custom, and so forth). Next, the dialog box places a toolbox or boxes onto the slide, from which you can select the tools you need to build your items, such as a data sheet for creating a graph. All let you view slides individually, simultaneously, or in outline form.

As we've come to a long way from merely advancing to the next slide, look to add some fancy transition effects between slides. These effects include screen wipes--such as sweeping one slide up to the left and the next slide in from the right--and horizontal or vertical splits. Slides can be separated by theatrical curtains that open and close, or they can dissolve into checkerboard or rainlike fades. During presentation, you can manually advance to the next slide by clicking the mouse or automatically by predetermining a time limit of, say, 30 seconds between slides. Automatic slide advancement frees you to attend to your notes and also helps to maintain the pace of your presentation. Additionally, an automatic build feature in each package lets bulletd text apper on consecutive slides. With each slide, a new bulleted item gets added and the previously bulleted points appear dimmed.