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Software on windows: Power Point Freelance Graphics Harvard Graphics
Software on other OS/Platform: Latex-basedWHICH PRESENTATION PROGRAM SHOULD YOU USE?By George E. Konold, Jr., The Color Slides Homepage
Which presentation graphics program should you buy to create your color slides, overhead transparencies and screen shows? With so many programs to choose from, how can you determine which program will meet your needs as well as make it easy to do the work of creating your presentation? This issue of The Color Slides Newsletter will relate my experiences with several of the popular programs to help you make an informed decision about which program to use when you create your slides.
FIRST A LITTLE HISTORY...
I have used most of the popular presentation graphics programs professionally over the last several years beginning with Harvard Graphics 2.3 for DOS 3.0 on a 386 machine, before Bill Gates introduced Windows. The next program I used was AT&T RIO that was much slicker than Harvard, but it was still a slow DOS program that required each slide to be worked on separately and also saved as a separate file. But, unlike Harvard, there were no templates or forms to fill in to create the slides, everything had to be created from scratch, including placing bullets individually by hand with the mouse. Those were difficult to line up properly!
When Microsoft introduced Windows 3.0 we bought Harvard Graphics 1.0 for Windows. This made life much easier with the Windows buttons to click. We could copy text, paste text, size it, and then color the text by clicking. Then we could click to print the slides. The templates included with the program made it easy to fill-in the blanks to create bullet slides, graphs, tables and charts.
With the upgrade to Windows 3.1, more programs were introduced to compete with the new Harvard Graphics 2.0. Microsoft introduced PowerPoint 3.0 and Lotus introduced Freelance Graphics 2.0. Those three programs were the most popular programs. Other programs included Aldus Persuasion, Word Perfect Presentations and lesser known programs like Astound and Key Presenter. There were probably other graphics programs that you could use to create slides, but these programs were the ones that I had experience with.
All of our business associates used Windows machines and very few used Macintosh. But, I was aware that Microsoft introduced PowerPoint for the Mac and there was an Aldus Persuasion version for Macintosh. We learned to convert those files for use with Windows, so life was becoming easier for us as our clients acquired the software and they learned to create their own slides.
Then came the upgrades... for Windows 3.1 and 3.11 programs. PowerPoint 4.0 was introduced as well as Harvard Graphics 3.0 and Freelance Graphics 2.1. We decided to stick with those three major players and we decided not to use Aldus Persuasion, Key Presenter, and Astound since none of our clients were using those programs. The expense of upgrading was weighed versus missing a few opportunities on a few clients, so we went with the most widely used programs.
The next upgrades came with Windows 95. They were Harvard Graphics 4.0, Freelance Graphics 96, and PowerPoint 7.0. The 32-bit Windows 95 operating system helped us immensely since we could finally multi-task our work by creating slides with one program, while simultaneously printing in another program. Especially with PowerPoint 7.0. It let us multi-task within itself by allowing us to print one presentation in the background while simultaneously creating another presentation in the foreground. Harvard and Freelance would not allow us to do this.
The current upgrades available are PowerPoint 97, Freelance Graphics 97 and no word on a Harvard Graphics upgrade... yet. But, with three programs to choose from, we still experienced a dilemma when deciding which program to use to create slides for our clients. I have not used Freelance 97, since none of our clients have used it to send us their files. PowerPoint 97 is much improved, although my pet peeves about launching another program to create a table and a graph remain. PowerPoint 97 and the rest of the Microsoft Office 97 products have a very slick interface with tool bar buttons that are flat until your mouse clicks them and they turn into 3-D buttons. Just like Microsoft Internet Explorer if you can relate to that. PowerPoint 97 can also convert your show into a presentation to run on your web site. I think I'll have to produce one for use on the Color Slides Homepage.
Note: This page is modified from an article in Color Slides Newsletter.