Upgrades, at last - Software Publishing's Harvard Graphics 3.0 and Adobe Systems' Persuasion 3.0 presentation software packages - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Dec, 1994 by Kellyn S. Betts, William Harrel

Version 3.0 of Harvard Graphics stresses quality over quantity. Instead of piling on the latest whiz-bang multimedia tools as some of its competitors have, Software Publishing focuses on adding ease-of-use features in hopes of staying competitive in the presentation graphics market. It's a strategy that works.

Harvard Graphics's Design Checker is one of the most notable additions designed to aid the novice or infrequent presenter. Part of the program's Advisor dialog box (which also provides general Quick Tips for creating presentations), the Design Checker reviews each frame in a slide show, alerts you to problems, and tells you how to fix them. It will let you know, for example, if you have too many bulleted items on a slide or too many slices in a pie chart.

With the new Quick Presentation option, you simply choose a presentation style (a quarterly report, for instance), enter the data, and you're ready to go. You can then quickly enliven your slide show with Harvard Graphics's animation player. The 15 animation clips included with the package, however, are not particularly stunning.

As always, Harvard Graphics has a way with words. Bulleted lists of all shapes and sizes are little more than a keystroke away. And as you compile the slides comprising your presentation, the program's slide editor, slide sorter, and outliner views make polishing the final work simple. You can even preview thumbnail screens of transition effects, such as wipes, dissolves, and fades.

Harvard Graphics finally provides black-and-white white print previews, so there are no surprises when you print out your presentation to distribute as handouts. One feature conspicuously absent, however, is support for Excel 5.0 for Windows, which means you can't take advantage of OLE 2.0's (object linking and embedding) drag-and-drop capabilities for importing Excel charts.

Harvard Graphics 3.0 is a welcome overall improvement. It's a solid, reliable workhorse with which you can easily produce simple but attractive desktop presentations.

In the other upgrade arena, if ever a program was sorely in need of an upgrade, it was Persuasion. Compared with the latest upgrades of competing presentation products, including Harvard Graphics, Persuasion 2.12 was long in the tooth.

Previous versions, on both the Windows and Mac platforms, lacked adequate color support. The Windows version did not support OLE in the screen show, which meant you could not, for example, use multimedia clips in your electronic presentations. The Mac version we saw has addressed these problems. (The Windows version was not shipping at press time, but it should be available by the time you read this.)

A very useful feature in Persuasion is its PageMaker-like approach to laying out slides - the document window uses a pasteboard metaphor. You design pages as you would on a layout table, complete with T-square rulers, gridlines, and a tabletop that you can move objects onto to get your design tools out of the way. Floating toolbars and color palettes make it easy to configure your work area.

One of the most notable improvements lies in Persuasion's color-management features. Previous versions, for example, did not provide access to all the colors in the system palette, meaning you had to save the color scheme each presentation. Now, all 256 colors are available at all times, and you can easily apply them to individual elements, such as body text, subtitles, and bullets.

Persuasion 3.0 lets you display a palette of all OLE or Publish and Subscribe clients on your system, so you can click on an icon to embed any linked object. The Mac version supports OLE 1.0 as well as Publish and Subscribe, letting you switch presentations between platforms easily. Persuasion does not support OLE 2.0, however, which means you can't drag and drop files between applications.

Persuasion does, on the other hand, offer the level of help that its competitors provide to novice or infrequent presenters. Like Harvard Graphics and Power Point, Persuasion offers onscreen cues, design tips, as well as a wealth of other features to get the newcomer started and remind the seasoned user how the program works.

Persuasion also lets you create attractive presentations complete with hotwords and buttons that launch multimedia files or open other programs. It's not quite as robust or flexible as other programs, but Persuasion has all you need to turn out great presentations.