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| PowerPoint Alternatives |
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Cover Stories May 2005 • Vol.3 Issue 5 |
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PowerPoint Alternatives Different Tools For Spicing Up Your Presentations |
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Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation patriarch—or so it seems. In business, this ubiquitous slideshow program is more popular than coffee at the corporate cafeteria. Sales agents, business executives, insurance adjusters, and even the guy running your local Boy Scouts parents' meeting use the program, almost by default, probably using the standard templates. And yet, according to software industry expert Michael Silver, the program became popular because it has always been bundled with Microsoft Office, not necessarily because it's the best choice. "In the early 1990s, there were other players that were better than PowerPoint but because Microsoft bundled it, and everyone that got Office got PowerPoint, it became an easy choice," says Silver, a Gartner Group vice president and research director. "It's easy to say that no other product is as compatible with what most people have on their PCs as PowerPoint." Of course, compatibility is not always the best reason to use a software program. Sure, sharing data between two applications is nice, but most people just use the basic PowerPoint functions. In fact, many PowerPoint slideshows look the same because we all use the default slideshow transitions, fonts, and even color schemes. Another Gartner Group analyst, Ken Dulaney, suggests that Microsoft has not added any new significant features to the product in at least five years (and maybe six or seven). Its popularity has more to do with Microsoft's dominance and the fact that you can easily share a slideshow with one of the other 400 million Microsoft Office users. Even though PowerPoint still reigns in business and at soccer club meetings, there are several noteworthy competitors—some that offer capabilities that are much more impressive. If you rely on PowerPoint now, there may be a better option that suits your needs. A feature-rich slideshow program can help sell a product or idea more effectively. They can provide better visual aids such as TV-quality transitions (you know, those animated effects they use on the evening news), background images, fonts, clip art, and other presentation-software amenities.  Visual Communicator 2 Studio One of the most popular PowerPoint alternatives is Serious Magic's Visual Communicator 2 (www.seriousmagic.com). If PowerPoint is like the Ford Taurus of business presentations, Visual Communicator is a sleek, stylish sports car. Instead of creating static text and clip art on slides, Visual Communicator lets you create a high-caliber video presentation. For example, you can quickly create a sales demo for a product with a "talking head" demonstrator who explains how your widget works. Then, you can add some amazing slide transitions that zoom across the screen with colorful text and graphics that look like they belong on CBS or NBC. The most important feature in the product, though, is that it's possible to create these videos using a vast library of templates. Open the File menu and select Wizard. The program prompts you to select whether you want a Pro video or Web-only video, which determines the quality of the final presentation. Then, the wizard walks you through the basics. You can select a template, such as a training video or college news presentation, and the program adds all the stock text, transitions, and video footage. You can edit slides by clicking on one and selecting Edit, then typing in your text. Video Communicator 2 Studio lets you export a video file that you can run on the Web, send via email, or burn to a CD and play on a home DVD player. With the Studio version, Serious Magic includes a "green screen" cloth so you can shoot live video in a cubicle somewhere and insert a background image of, say, Niagara Falls. To add your own video, you'll need a camcorder that lets you transfer files to a PC. It's also worth mentioning that if you do create your own videos, the quality will vary depending on the camcorder you use, lighting in the room, and the microphones you use for audio recording. Serious Magic claims that about 20,000 people run Visual Communicator slideshows every month, which certainly pales in comparison to the 30 million estimated PowerPoint slideshows that people see each month, but is still noteworthy. One of the primary reasons why people are switching to Visual Communicator has to do with the desire for a better alternative. Feature-for-feature, Visual Communicator has PowerPoint beat in just about every category. There are far more templates, transitions, and font choices, and the final product is more visually appealing: which, in turn, helps sell a product or communicate an idea better than a mundane slideshow. Of course, one of the major drawbacks is that Visual Communicator 2 Studio, the one with all the nifty video-export options, costs $489.95, or about the same as the entire Microsoft Office suite. The Web-only version costs $189.95, and the Pro version is available for $289.95. Still, if your main goal is just to show some text and graphics in a slideshow, there may be a better option. OpenOffice Impress There's one obvious choice for those who already own Microsoft PowerPoint, even if your copy came with your computer or your company owns a site license for multiple copies. OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) is an open-source application, which means it's freely available as a download from the Internet. OpenOffice includes word processing, database, spreadsheet, and drawing applications in addition to Impress, the tool for creating slideshows. We're not going to mince words: Impress is not that impressive. Essentially, the features are an almost-exact duplicate of what you will find in PowerPoint. There are only a small handful of templates to pick from, and most of them are quite amateurish. The interface is clunky (most of the icons have an unappealing blotchiness to them) and the program tends to crash. However, for a free product, Impress does do exactly what it claims: It lets you create simple slideshows. And, interestingly enough, there are some unique features. Impress lets you generate a Macromedia Flash slideshow that runs on the Web. The Fontworks feature helps you create 2D and 3D animated text far easier than the archaic text tools in PowerPoint. You can drag-and-drop any icon on the toolbar (located to the left of the work area) so that it appears as a palette that you can move anywhere on the screen. Not even the best Adobe applications offer this feature. Because of the PowerPoint-like functionality, anyone can start using Impress in minutes. The program starts with a simple template selection screen. Once you start a new presentation, you can just click the text boxes and add your own words. You can use the Slideshow menu to start a new slideshow and customize slide transitions and effects. Simple, yet effective. Corel Presentations 12 No other company seems to understand that people are ready to upgrade from PowerPoint better than Corel (www.corel.com). Corel has aimed WordPerfect Office 12 suite ($249.99) squarely at former Microsoft customers. When you start Corel Presentations 12, the first dialog box you see prompts you to select whether you want to run in Presentations Mode or Microsoft PowerPoint Mode. The difference is negligible—only a few menu choices change—but the target user is obvious. Corel Presentations distinguishes itself from PowerPoint in several ways. You can export a presentation as a PDF (Portable Document Format) file and send to anyone for viewing. Or you can export a slideshow as a Macromedia Flash file for Web viewing. Presentations uses what Corel calls a "real-time preview:" which just means you can change a font using the Font menu on a toolbar and see the change on the slide (as opposed to having to wade through dialog boxes in PowerPoint). Presentations even includes the Microsoft PowerPoint help system (click File and Help), another indication that Corel intends to ease the transition to Word Perfect Office 12. Because Word Perfect Office 12 is the second-best-selling application suite behind Microsoft Office 2003 (according to NPD Group), Presentations is one of the most common slideshow alternatives. The templates and slide-transition options are not nearly as powerful or professional as what you will find in Visual Communicator, although there is a tight integration with Word Perfect and other Word Perfect programs. For example, the spell checker and item select options under the Edit menu are similar to those in Word Perfect. Other Alternatives In addition to Serious Magic's video-centric alternative and Corel's super-powerful presentation workhouse, there are still a few other PowerPoint alternatives. These more-specialized applications still offer some unique features, such as better transition effects and export features. Freelance Graphics. According to Gartner Group analyst Ken Dulany, the only reason Freelance Graphics is still a contender in the presentation-software market is because so many users own the product already, as part of the Lotus SmartSuite package ($281; www.306.ibm.com/software/lotus). One of the original competitors to PowerPoint, Freelance Graphics has changed little in the last few years. The interface has a decidedly Windows 95 look and feel, with ultra-basic template choices. Apple Keynote 2. Apple is widely known as a technology innovator, so it's no surprise that their Mac-only slideshow product, which is part of the iWork suite ($79; www.apple .com/iwork), makes PowerPoint look like it belongs in the computing dark ages. Some of the key features include some nifty slide-transition effects (such as Falling Tiles and Page Flip), more control over object animations (you can make text pop-up on the screen with a sweeping fly-in maneuver), and colorful, eye-grabbing themes (which is the Apple term for template). One interesting feature involves running a second monitor, on which you can display a countdown timer, slide notes, a thumbnail of the next slide, and a clock. Keynote 2 runs smooth and crisp on a Mac desktop or laptop computer, although it's questionable whether the program itself is worth buying a new computer if you already use a PC. Harvard Graphics. No other presentation program has quite the same rich history as Harvard Graphics. The program started out as a DOS-only application and moved cautiously into the Windows XP world several years ago. The program, still alive and well, is now called Pro Presentations 3 ($295; www.harvardgraphics.com). The slideshow application uses a "more is better" approach to features, offering an animated tutor that can pop-up in the slideshow, image-transparency effects, Macromedia Flash output, and better scanner support than PowerPoint.  by John Brandon
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