Alternative to Powerpoint for Presentations

3stripe

Need to do some powerpoint presentations for a client, they've asked for them in Powerpoint. (eugh) So just wondering if there are any Powerpoint alternatives out there? Ideally it would be templatable, fairly idiot proof to update, but slicker than Powerpoint in terms of graphics/transitions etc. Anything from Macromedia that might work I wonder, hmm.

nifkin

I think Breeze is the macromedia online-powerpoint type app.

That said, my dad does a lot of presenting at various seminars for an organization that has a bunch of designers/etc. pre-pack a lot of presentation materials for them in powerpoint and such. Apparently at their last meeting the basic feedback they had for the designers was "It's very nice that you can make everything transition in and move and such, but if you do it too much it's an impediement to our presentations and people pay more attention to what the slides are doing than to what we're saying."

Just a side note for everyone to keep in the back of their heads.

3stripe

Yup I would agree on that front. (Powerpoint is just a little frumpy for my liking.)

graste

One powerpoint alternative is OpenOffice Presentations. Simply test 1.1.4 or the (imho very stable) Beta of the upcoming OO2. Webbased presentations are "in" btw. ;) - http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/operashow/ - http://s5presents.com/ - http://soapbx.com/main/

nathan

What OS do you plan on using? I would HIGHLY recommend KeyNote for Mac if you have one. It is a little pricey, but well worth it.

dwclifton

Courtesy of Eric Meyer and Tantek:

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System

3stripe

I think they'll be PC based. I think a web-based presentation might be a selling point as it could sit on the website as well. Thanks for all the pointers folks.

patrix

what about Openoffice.org ?

sweeney

s5 is cool.
Incidentally, www.ntk.net featured it today in their newsletter...

It's a bit disturbing how much we've talked about PowerPoint alternatives in Tracking in the past - and the immediate present, for that matter. S5 is Eric Meyer's re-coding of the old Opera Show trick, whereby a nicely-formatted single XHTML page can be magically transformed into a complete, formatted PowerPointy presentation, all in your standards-compliant browser. Opera's parlour trick merely let you page up and down the pages while in full-screen mode, and got a bit tricky to using when Opera started showing the ads in front of your bid for venture capital. Eric's version lets you jump around the slides with keyboard shortcuts, do primitive transitions, and, most importantly, still code the whole thing up in simple HTML. http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ - S5. Catchy. http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-01-31#TRACKING - its fine forebear

dwclifton

S5 is pretty slick, easy to use if you can code XHTML, easy to style if you know CSS, and is independent of any desktop application. Plus, they run in any decent browser. Hell, some of these a-listers put together a slideshow for a conference, it gets released on the Web, and afterwards the presentation will get bookmarked like crazy on del.icio.us and Furl and receive boatloads of traffic.

This one: The Elements of Meaningful XHTML, has a PR of 6 for example.

3stripe

I'm liking the idea of a browser based presentation a lot. My only concern is that non techies must be able to put together their own presentation. Meyers stuff is nice but I would need a CMS system almost so that an idiot could put together a presentation. Images as well could be tricky. Hmmm, has anyone done a kind of app version of this yet?

dwclifton

Not that I'm aware of. But I was thinking that a nice front-end for technically challenged people would be pretty sweet. I said challenged. lol