Often at work we research and produce data that will eventually assist someone, somewhere, making a presentation - and chances are they will use Microsoft's PowerPoint software to do it. The foundations of PowerPoint software lie in a program developed in 1984 for the Apple Macintosh called 'Presenter'. The company that developed it was purchased by Microsoft in 1987, and the renamed product has gradually become an integral part of the Microsoft Office suite. Which is great, because it means that the file format has become ubiquitous, and terrible, because it means that the phrase 'death by PowerPoint' has entered the English language.
In tough financial times, however, we increasingly find ourselves having to make our own presentations. This may be because the creative team that used to make our slides look beautiful have vanished into the economic restructuring thin air, or because we are having to build a bigger profile for our department and services. Either way I thought it timely to have a survey of alternatives to Microsoft's software - some of which are free.
OpenOffice Presentation Tool
I noticed the other day on Twitter that Mike Ellis, a veteran of running Web services for museums [http://electronicmuseum.org.uk/], said: 'OpenOffice: 100,000,000 downloads. Wow. Proves that software doesn't have to be good to be popular...'. It is a common criticism.
OpenOffice is, as the name suggests, an open source software alternative to the Microsoft Office suite, which features a word processor, database, spreadsheet program, and presentation software. It is written by volunteers, but corporate computing companies like Sun, Oracle, Novell, IBM, Google and others have also contributed sponsorship to the project. The software is free to download, and works across PC, Mac and Linux computers.
One of the great advantages of OpenOffice - apart from the price point of 'free' - is that it basically replicates the functionality of Microsoft Office, meaning it easy for users of one to switch to the other. This is also a liability, because it means the open source program has implemented some of the less user-friendly features of Office, and often without the expertise in making the user interface as easy as the paid alternative.
Like PowerPoint, OpenOffice comes equipped with a wizard to help you set your presentation up using some predefined templates, and comes with some truly hideous pre-designed backgrounds. Nevertheless, the software is functional, and if you can steer away from themes like 'Red noise shapes' will do a perfectly good job of putting a presentation together. You can also use it to read and edit the .ppt file format produced by PowerPoint, even if you don't have the Microsoft software installed on your machine.
Google Presentations
You may have heard of the shift towards 'cloud computing' and 'software as a service', and Google Documents is one of the prime examples of this. Google provide a suite of online programs that mimic office productivity suites, including a presentation program. Like OpenOffice, the service is free - all you need is a Google account and a relatively recent major web browser.
A strong point from Google's offering is the ability for more than one person to use the software at the same time, editing the same document. I've done this myself at work, when I have been planning a co-presentation with a colleague. We are able to sit side-by-side, both working on our laptops, both adding and editing slides in our own sections of the same document. This is unique to the tools covered in this article.
One important thing to note though is that Google recently announced that they were dropping support for that old workhorse Internet Explorer 6, which still has a large presence on corporate networks. That may influence your decision on whether to invest time and effort in learning how to use Google Docs.
The interface is easy to understand, with a pane showing an overview of your slides, and a larger pane in the middle showing the slide you are currently working on. Clicking a 'talking heads' icon allows you to add speaker notes. You can upload images for your presentation from your computer, or do as Google suggests, and 'try adding images from a website by dragging them onto the slide'. It is a nifty bit of functionality - but it maybe ought to come with a warning about copyright theft!
Apple Keynote
Keynote is Apple's alternative to PowerPoint, and is only available for Mac users. Described by my friend Mat Wall, software architect at The Guardian, as 'everything that PowerPoint should be', the software usually gets rave reviews.
At the heart of it is a more usable way to build complicated presentation elements. The software integrates with other elements in the Apple software suite, like iPhoto, to make it easy to put your deck of slide together. It comes with 44 pre-defined themes that, as you'd expect from Apple, are beautifully designed. Complicated 'builds', where elements gradually appear on the screen, are easy to assemble.
Keynote isn't without issues though, including an odd bug that can sometimes cause your computer to crash and restart as you are trying to save changes to a document. In my experience, this usually happens just after you have made a series of crucial and significant changes with only seconds to spare before giving the presentation to high-powered audience.
Apple have been recently running a public beta of a live collaborative version of iWork [http://www.apple.com/iwork/iwork-dot-com/] which allows Keynote presentations to be exported onto the web. The software also produces PDF and Quicktime movie versions of your slides. First available in 2003, the current version of Keynote is available as part of the iWork package, and costs $79 / �71 / �79.
Prezi
Prezi is a re-imagining of how presentation software could work. Instead of a series of slides, you create a scene, by laying all of the items in your presentation out on one canvas. You then plot a 'path' through the elements, and when viewing the presentation it is as if a camera is panning across your canvas, highlighting and selecting the items in order.
Ben Betts, a Research Engineer at Warwick University has said: 'This should be the death of PowerPoint in my opinion. Not that PowerPoint is a terrible tool, but the way it inherently asks you to make a presentation (with bullets in a linear fashion) is just plain wrong in my opinion. Prezi is much better to give users a non-linear presentation which networks your concepts together. Plus it looks great and embodies what a great 'Software as a Service' experience should be - innovative and truly adding value to the process.'
It can be devastatingly effective, and, if you have been proceeded in a conference programme by some very dull presentations, a breath of fresh air for the audience though. A note of caution though. The flash-based editing tool has a steep learning curve. You also need to have a really good idea of the layout of your presentation before starting - I'd recommend planning it on pencil and paper first. In contrast to Ben, as my colleague at The Guardian, Mairead O'Connor put it:
'It was great fun for about 3 minutes, until I realised I couldn't actually do the things that I wanted it to do. I'm never using it again, I went back to using PowerPoint because it was more productive.'
There is a tendency for first time users to have the path zooming and swooping all over the place, which can be distracting for the audience. Even if it doesn't sound like the tool for you, I'd recommend that you at least look at the demonstration video though, and see if it sparks your imagination.
The service is free, but if you want to create more than a couple of 'Prezi' files, there are paid plans starting at $59 a year.
SlideShare
And when you have finished your presentation - why not share it? Well, maybe not if it has sensitive corporate information in it, but if you have given the presentation in public, adding it to SlideShare can increase your audience. The service allows you to upload presentations in a variety of formats, including PowerPoint, Keynote, and PDF documents. You title and tag your presentation, add some notes, and then you are ready to share it with the web. Other users are able, if you give permission, to embed your presentation in their websites, or download the original document.
SlideShare can also be a great research tool - searching for a tag will bring up lots of presentations on your chosen topic, and just browsing around the highest rated presentations can give you some inspiration to break out of the monotony of having lots of slides of bulleted lists, graphs and charts.
If your corporate network is locked down, wedded to IE6, and all your document management revolves around Microsoft file formats, these tools may not be for you. However, if you get a chance to experiment, you'll find that Prezi and Keynote open up possibilities of a better designed presentation experience, and Google and OpenOffice provide an alternative price point to PowerPoint - free.
Martin Belam is Information Architect at guardian.co.uk, and the Contributing Editor for Share at FUMSI. Over the last decade he has given countless presentations at conferences, where as much as possible he tries to avoid PowerPoint's default format bulleted lists. Martin blogs at currybet.net, and you can find some of his presentations of work from The Guardian and the BBC at http://www.slideshare.net/currybet
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Often at work we research and produce data that will eventually assist someone, somewhere, making a presentation - and chances are they will use Microsoft's PowerPoint software to do it. The foundations of PowerPoint software lie in a program developed in 1984 for the Apple Macintosh called 'Presenter'. The company that developed it was purchased by Microsoft in 1987, and the renamed product has gradually become an integral part of the Microsoft Office suite. Which is great, because it means that the file format has become ubiquitous, and terrible, because it means that the phrase 'death by PowerPoint' has entered the English language.
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