Advice needed - software to make Powerpoint presentations

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hi folks,

I need to make a Powerpoint presentation by next week. I’ve done them before, using computers at work which have Microsoft Office installed, but this time I can’t use work computers because the presentation is for a competitor that is thinking about hiring me.

I don’t have Microsoft Office, all I have is a small netbook with a Microsoft Office temporary license that expired 4 year ago. :frowning: And I don’t want to pay the full Microsoft fee for what will amount to a one-time use for me. I don’t mind paying a small fee for temporary use though.

Searching on the net I found a few sites that have on-line ‘powerpoint’ compatible services, like SlideRocket, but I just don’t know if they will be worth the money.

Does anyone here have experience with services that will let me make a Powerpoint compatible presentation (i.e., it must be able to save into a format that will play in Powerpoint), looking professional, but not costing an arm and a leg?

Thanks.

2

You can try Open Office or Google Docs. Both are free. Neither had presentation as their strong point last time I used them, but for both it was over a year ago.

3

OpenOffice / LibreOffice Impress is capable of creating Powerpoint-compatible presentations, but it’s very often the case that documents created in one suite don’t quite look/work the same in another (heck, you can have problems with PP presentations when you just open them in a different version of PowerPoint).

It’s a big risk, especially in this context, walking in with an essentially untested presentation.

I believe Impress may be able to export a presentation to a Macromedia Shockwave Flash file and HTML - if you use Impress, save your presentation to a number of different formats (i.e. PPT, PPTX, HTML and SWF), take them all along and ask for ‘tinker time’ before presenting it.

4

Microsoft offers trial versions of Office, including Powerpoint.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-ca/try/?WT.mc_id=ODC_enCA_Office_Try

5

Microsoft has a free PowerPoint viewer, so he should be able to create it in one of the free tools, and then test it with the viewer.

6

Thank you all!

I’ll try out Open Office and then use the free Microsoft Powerpoint viewer to check that it’s OK.

I’ll also ask for ‘tinker time’ when I get there, just to be sure!

Again, thank you all so much, it would have taken me hours (which I don’t have) to find a solution by myself.

7

I use Open Office a lot, and in my experience complex Power Point presentations don;t display well in Open Office, but the opposite works. Especially if you keep it simple. But definitely check with the free PPT viewer. Unless you are planning lots of animation, you can also export to pdf which will be guaranteed the same on any machine.

8

Another alternative might be to take the netbook with you and plug it into their projector - then whatever works, should still work.

9

Try Prezi, it’s free (unless you want bells and whistles you likely don’t need), entirely web based and a lot more interesting to watch than Powerpoint slides.

To present, all you need is a browser and internet connection. Is there a compelling reason it HAS to play in Powerpoint?

10

One of my coworkers used this for a presentation this week - it was much more engaging than powerpoint.

11

This is just a reply to all of you in this thread who helped me out (everyone’s answer was helpful), to let you know what happened.

I’m not a presentation expert by any means, and I had to deliver the presentation in less than 7 days (5 days after posting here), on a topic that I didn’t already know very much about. So I wasn’t going to be spending time learning how to incorporate animations or 3D effects because I had to spend most of my time just researching the topic itself.

For the visuals, I just needed a basic slideshow with pictures and text to carry me through.

After a few false-starts, and 3 hours wasted with OpenOffice (it wouldn’t allow me to open the presentation area - don’t ask me why), I downloaded LibreOffice Impress, and it worked.

It was very easy to use. I had to do the presentation in two languages, and Libre didn’t have a problem with that, well not much of a problem anyway - a few glitches in re-sizing non-English text.

I finished the final version on Tuesday (two days before the presentation) and I saved it in a few different formats onto a USB that I could take with me to the presentation. I also saved it onto the hard drive of my netbook in native LibreOffice format (of course). I didn’t know what resources they had at their firm but I wanted to be prepared for anything, or at least as much as I could, so I took both the USB and netbook with me.

When I arrived at their conference room I saw it was fully equipped for any kind of multimedia presentation. So rather than asking them to dick around with my USB saved files, I just plugged my netbook into their wall display and opened the document that I’d already played back to myself a hundred times.

It went without a hitch.

One thing about Libre though - I had planned to make handouts for everyone (something I hadn’t bothered to do ever before in other presentations), and I had assumed that it would be easy to derive handouts from an already created presentation, but I just couldn’t find out how to do it. The software was not very helpful in that regard:

‘Help’; ‘how to make handouts?’: ‘Yes!, you can make handouts in Libre!’, was about it.

My fault, I know, in that I didn’t know enough about how to use the software. But in a way it’s a good thing I didn’t give them handouts - no paper trail that I was ever there at their firm, and if they forget some important point that they need to know, they have to come back and ask me personally. To which I can suggest that if they hire me, I can remind them. :stuck_out_tongue:

So thanks again all!

12

LibreOffice is the open descendant of Open Office, so it was a good choice. As for handouts, on my OO view -> handouts seems to do it, and printing in that view seems to give you the proper number of slides per page.

Glad it went well. Hope you get the job.