There is no doubt that PowerPoint is the most popular software product to create presentations. But this does not mean that alternatives do not exist. Let's look at some software packages that are freely available and can replace PowerPoint in most cases.
OpenOffice Impress is a presentation software program included in the OpenOffice.org suite and is available for free download.
Open Office Impress is one of the most simple programs for mastering. Users familiar with Microsoft PowerPoint will have no problem making a presentation in Open Office Impress. Anyone can create stunning presentations that look like they were designed by professionals. An added bonus is that it is possible to use presentations that are created in PowerPoint.
SlideRocket is software for creating online presentations. Working with SlideRocket is only possible if you have an Internet connection. The ability to insert video and audio is available. It is possible to create presentations together with other users. Functions are available to import/export slides from/to PowerPoint, create PDF files, export presentations to formats that can be viewed on any computer.
The free version of this program offers the most commonly used features.
Brainshark is an online software for creating video presentations with the ability to view online. The service runs on cloud technologies and is available for use on smartphones and tablets.
Prezi is software for creating online presentations. Prezi moves away from traditional slide technology and instead uses the concept of visual maps. The presenter can control the content. Or the demonstration can be set to automatic mode. Prezi provides the ability to create non-linear presentations.
Presentations created in the browser can be presented either over the Internet or downloaded to your local machine. In the second case, an Internet connection is not required.
The free version of the program has 100 MB of storage available. A paid subscription to use the program with more advanced features is also possible.
Any user with an Internet connection can register a free account to use Acrobat.com presentation. The only requirement is Flash Player installed on the user's computer.
The service allows you to quickly and easily create high-quality presentations. There are limitations to this software, but these restrictions are not significant. They relate to the functions of inserting animation and sound. So for someone who likes to abuse it, it's even an advantage.
Google Slides offers the ability to collaborate with colleagues to create and edit presentations. You simply share your file by listing the addresses email those people to whom you want to provide access to collaborate. The main task of the service is to provide the ability to quickly create presentations.
Naturally, Google Slides It is still far from the functionality of PowerPoint, but the service does not set itself such tasks.
Program for creating electronic PowerPoint presentations, this is a de facto standard, and so explicit that most people don’t even think that there are other software packages for create slideshows and presentations, not only not inferior to Powerpoint, but, unlike it, have an important advantage - they are free.
So, this time let's talk about free analogues of PowerPoint– if you search, there are at least a dozen such programs, and among them are both familiar installed applications and online editors. I will focus on three that, in my personal opinion, really correspond to the concept of “analogue of PowerPoint” - that is, programs for creating presentations.
Hand on heart, it should be noted that, although the functionality of all the programs reviewed almost completely replicates PowerPoint, the ease of use of the latter remains unrivaled - after all, it’s difficult to compete with Microsoft when it comes to creating successful interfaces.
The most “spartan” version of the free electronic presentation editor is an online application from the GoogleDocs suite. A reasonable minimum of capabilities is at your service - you can insert additional slides, tables, change slide design styles, add images, customize transitions, etc.
Naturally, you can not only create new files, but also edit those downloaded from your computer, however, some details (especially fonts) may disappear, although the overall appearance of the presentation should not suffer much.
There are no other “frills” in the editor, however, these features are more than enough to create a draft (or a “quick presentation”). At any time, the result can be saved to your computer in almost familiar formats - from PDF to PPTX, but the “outdated” PPT
Presentations in GoogleDocs are a very convenient solution for two reasons:
True, it goes without saying that without high-speed Internet Not a single GoogleDocs presentation will be available to you, and a Google account is required. However, in our time this can no longer be called a limitation.
A classic application installed on a computer, an analogue of the MS Office package, which also includes a presentation editor. In general, the program is available in standard (free) and extended (paid) versions, however, I did not even consider the second option.
Pleasant design, emphasized similarity with PowerPoint (even the principle and style of arrangement of elements), while, for some reason, only English language interface. A trifle, but it spoils the impression.
Although Kingsoft Presentation is inferior to its rival in terms of the number of functions, this mainly concerns proprietary PowerPoint “bells and whistles” of the type, and even for them there are peculiar analogues. Standard presentation functions in Kingsoft are present in full, including charts and graphs (the presence of a full-fledged spreadsheet editor in the Kingsoft package greatly simplifies their creation).
Kingsoft Presentation - quite convenient and nice flowcharts...
A very convenient solution on the part of the editor’s developers is to simplify and make some aspects more obvious compared to PowerPoint, such as the intuitive and beautiful flowchart editor.
The overall impression of the program, however, remains ambivalent - on the one hand, everything seems to be provided and in place, on the other - one gets the feeling that in the free version of Kingsoft Presentation the functions were cut out “at the last moment”, so sometimes the most popular ones are missing » elements, such as the ability to edit the appearance of diagrams added to the slide.
...and boring graphics
Savings of completed works are available in PPT and native DPS formats. Kingsoft Presentation also supports export to PDF. When opening a presentation prepared in PowerPoint, no distortion was observed. As in the opposite case.
Another classic application, also included in the software package, is copies of MS Office packages.
The first impression of O&O Impress is as if PowerPoint was open on the screen, only from 2003 - dull gray panels, an icon... However, if we put aside bias (well, the program didn’t work out well with its appearance) and think rationally, then we have an almost complete copy of PowerPoint , which provides literally all the features of this program, without even a hint of any money - O&O Impress is free from top to bottom.
OpenOffice Impress - ascetic and harsh in appearance
The weak point of the program is “beautifulness”. O&O Impress does not have built-in templates or themes for presentation design, and all table display settings, for example, end with choosing the color of individual cells.
...but has a bunch of useful features
Saves of completed works are available in PPT and native ODP formats. Also supports export to PDF. When opening a presentation prepared in PowerPoint, no distortion was observed. As in the opposite case.
There is still no better option than PowerPoint in terms of a set of parameters, both operational (program capabilities) and subjective (ease of use).
However, there are at least two programs that are quite capable of replacing the “heavyweight”:
You also can’t discount GoogleDocs presentations - despite the greatly reduced set of capabilities, the comparative versatility of this application can help you out more than once and provide you with a convenient tool that you can use, if desired, even from a smartphone.
The versatility of PowerPoint is, of course, priceless. You can easily create interactive “sales” presentations, present information to listeners, and even embed photo galleries and videos directly into the presentation. All this allows you to present your products and services in an interesting and enticing way, and make the learning process easy and effective!
But here's the problem: in order to legally use PowerPoint for business purposes, you need to subscribe to the cloud-based Office 365 package or buy a separate license for PowerPoint, and this, as we understand, costs a lot of money, unless you are non-profit organization, for which discounts apply.
That's why it's interesting to take a closer look at these PowerPoint alternatives, which have completely free basic versions, and advanced paid packages are still cheaper than PowerPoint. Using them, you will prepare great presentations, make a great impression on your clients, and close deals easily.
This program is perfect for you, especially if you wanted to improve and diversify the interactive transitions between slides in your presentation. Super-smooth transitions between background and foreground and amazing zoom-in and zoom-out capabilities let you unleash your creativity like never before.
This program is based on several ready-made excellent templates, unlimited possibilities for customizing the presentation and more than 35 million (!) beautiful free photos. All this makes Haiku Deck a very interesting PowerPoint replacement. The program works online and there is also an application version for tablets.
If you're looking for a program to create hand-drawn, animated, comic-style presentations that are becoming increasingly popular, then Powtoon is perfect for you. You can create your first cartoon in just a few minutes! But reverse side The medal is that, unfortunately, the program is not very convenient for live presentation. This PowerPoint alternative is good for animated video presentations for the website. social networks, viral videos. Try it, it's easy!
This program has one of the best set of features, close to PowerPoint. If you are working on a computer that was released earlier than 2011, then, however, you will encounter the fact that many functions are slow and glitchy, and in some cases the program may even crash. Newer computers, meanwhile, work fine with Emaze.
POWERPOINTPRO
License type:
Quacked
Languages:
Windows 8, 8 64-bit, 7, 7 64-bit, Vista, Vista 64-bit, XP, XP 64-bit
Downloaded:
We continue our reviews of software analogues that can adequately replace Microsoft products on the MacOS X platform, and now we will talk about MS PowerPoint. First, you should understand the basic functions of MS PowerPoint, which will help you establish clear requirements for similar programs.
The main function of the graphics program MS PowerPoint is creating and editing presentations, although sometimes this application is used for other purposes, for example, to create documentation or layouts of advertising materials. It is worth immediately noting that this is unfounded, because the main element that we get as a result is a slide, and ideally, after productive work with the program, the user receives a slide show with the necessary effects, interactivity and a developed transition system, which is played in the program itself or exported to a video clip of a popular format.
It turns out that the main requirements for similar programs are as follows:
MS PowerPoint and similar programs are not designed for professional designers, but rather for office workers who need to present their ideas and developments, and the goal of working with the program is to effectively provide information with minimal time, so the simplicity of analogue programs is an important advantage.
Perhaps MS PowerPoint is the most common program for working with slides, but this does not mean that it is the most effective and functional. In any case, it does not quite correspond to the formulated requirements. To review similar programs, a special test file was created that will be opened in all programs to further check compatibility with the format.
The first version of the program was distributed separately, starting with the second, Keynote has its own text editor, Pages, and is included with Apple iWork. Steve Jobs assures that the application was initially created based on his development and exclusively for personal use, but it turned out so successfully that Apple decided to launch the program for commercial sale. This is very likely, because working in PowerPoint on Macs is not easy and Keynote brings a lot of new things to the genre of creating computer presentations.
Keynote's concept is based on the concept of templates and diagrams, and will seem familiar to users who have already seen Pages. Compared to PowerPoint templates, Keynote templates don't just serve to demonstrate the structure of information and the range of applications of the program, they are more functional.
There are rumors that the templates were made by an independent design studio, and each template proposed by the designers was personally approved by Steve Jobs. It is not known whether this is true or not, but each program template is a small masterpiece.
Each Keynote diagram (template) is a part of the document, which is described as its property. You can change it at any time, and the entire document will change in accordance with the new template; of course, you can change only one or a few slides if you wish. This is very convenient, even if the user is carried away by formatting, the presentation will be made in the same style.
Let's take a look at real example, opening a test file prepared in PowerPoint, and also checking Keynote’s compatibility with Microsoft products.
Compatibility is not perfect, but very good. We see that the chart created in PowerPoint has changed a little, but this can be easily corrected by using the Chart tab in the Inspector panel. I have not had to deal with this problem, but there are complaints about opening presentation comments. The main thing to remember is that Keynote is a completely different product, with its own ideology of working with documents, tools, and information storage format. A good PowerPoint alternative should open ppt files flawlessly, so full compatibility with Keynote is not possible, but it is very high, let's say 98%.
Having corrected the diagram, let's continue working with the program and try to apply the new template.
General view document changes in better side after changing the background and some fonts. Please note - in the following image, the Masters button provides several options for formatting the slide. There are corresponding formatting options for different templates.
In terms of functionality, Keynote even surpasses PowerPoint in some aspects, even the same transition effects from one slide to another. Keynote's "frivolity" is deceptive; it's even partly a hallmark of Apple developers, who know how to make serious office products light and interesting. Another advantage of Keynote is its integration with iLife, which makes it possible to simply drag and drop photos from iPhoto, music from iTunes, and even movies from iMovie into a presentation from the Media palette.
The main characteristics of the new Keynote interface concept, which the company subsequently applied to Pages, are compactness, clarity and good structure. Such an interface allows users to easily and conveniently create and edit complex, informative and beautiful documents, focusing on the content of the document and without being distracted by technical nuances and searching for the right buttons.
In addition to its own format, Keynote has advanced export functions and allows you to export slides and presentations in PowerPoint format, although it is worth noting that PowerPoint itself may not correctly display Keynote templates applied to the presentation, and also does not support many transition effects, so the presentation view in PowerPoint may not differ for the better. In addition to external export functions, Keynote provides users with the ability to export graphic images of various formats (jpg,png, tiff), various Flash animation files, QuickTime videos, html files, as well as the central format of all MacOS X - PDF.
From the above, we can conclude that Keynote has a number of significant advantages, provided that there is no need for further distribution of presentations in ppt format.
Unlike previous reviews, in this one I will not dwell further on the OpenOffice package. It is common knowledge that this application is not entirely a MacOS X product and requires a special X11 mode. In addition, the second version of NeoOffice, the “native” version of OpenOffice for MacOS X, is in no way inferior in functionality, so there is no particular point or need to use OpenOffice.
In our reviews, in the vast majority of cases, NeoOffice, created on the principle of “MS Office, but for free,” was and remains on the list of leaders. The principle of a real alternative to Microsoft is both an advantage and a disadvantage, as can be seen from previous reviews. The program developers do not offer any new functions and distinctive features, so the program is doomed to follow its famous counterpart forever. However, the interface for creating and working with presentations differs in many ways from PowerPoint.
While almost fully compatible with the PowerPoint format, the mode of operation offered by NeoOffice is slightly different. If in Keynote the visual presentation of the presentation comes first, then the priority of NeoOffice is the structure and content of the document. In addition to the selected operating mode, there are various options for presenting the document ("thesis", "structure", "notes") and quick access to the panel for changing slide layouts. Switching between modes is organized not through the View menu, as is customary at Microsoft, but in the form of tabs in the main window. Without a doubt, this is a very good move from the NeoOffice developers. When the user is faced with a proposal to present a document in a different form, and this requires just one click of the mouse, a seemingly insignificant addition to the interface while working on the presentation sets the mood for a completely different time.
The developed NeoOffice export system makes it possible to save presentations in various graphic formats or as a flash video. Moreover, export to PDF, which is a separate command in the menu, works even more reliably than in PowerPoint itself. A small minus - I did not find the ability to export the presentation as a video clip.
The main problem with NeoOffice is the same - speed. And as long as you're working with a word processor or spreadsheet, it's still tolerable, but working in presentation mode requires a lot of graphics, effects, and animation. This is where the slow speed of NeoOffice becomes a serious drawback.
I tested this program on an iMac G5 with 512MB, and its speed was considered "not working". This means that the latest Mac model is a must for users who plan to use NeoOffice as their only office suite.
One of the few commercial alternative programs for the Microsoft suite is the ThinkFree Office office suite, and on a Mac this alternative generally becomes the only one; after all, Apple iWork cannot yet be called a full-fledged office suite, since it does not have a spreadsheet editor. At the same time, the ThinkFree Office Show application, created for working with presentations, has many negative reviews, in contrast to the more successful Write and Calc. A huge drawback of the program, which even causes bewilderment, is that ThinkFree Office Show has no idea what a diagram is, but in the same Calc there is a function for creating diagrams. When opening our test document, the program turned the diagram into a graphic image with distortions, in other words, an inaccurate picture. Even if you try to create a diagram in Calc and then transfer it to Show, distortions still remain.
The second significant drawback is the poorly developed export system. ThinkFree Office Show offers a limited number of graphic formats (jpg, png and vector svg only), you can save presentations in
ppt format, which is the internal format of the program, or in html, but there is no export to PDF, it seems that the developers decided that the MacOS X tools are more than enough, perhaps in some cases they are right. But there is a nice bonus - the “Export to iPod” command in the menu; there is nothing like it in any application from this review.
It's likely that the ThinkFree Office Show's focus was on the Write word processor and Calc spreadsheet, both of which were praised in our previous reviews. But Show is rather a fly in the ointment, which may well force potential users to pay attention to other alternatives to Microsoft products.
ThinkFree.com is an Internet resource written in Java, which is an online version of the office suite of the same name. It is very likely that at the moment ThinkFree.com is the most powerful and effective resource among other analogies that provide users with a similar service. Recognized market leaders Google and Microsoft are just starting to work in this direction, which is quite surprising, while Zoho.com, whose review is below, lags noticeably behind. There are serious reasons for this, because, despite the fact that the very idea of accessing an office suite with similar functions via the Internet is interesting and promising, about creating high-quality presentations and functionality of this resource It's still too early to say.
While the functionality of ThinkFree.com Show may still seem impressive for the online version, it is frankly not enough for normal operation. At the same time, the resource retained all the shortcomings of the offline prototype, including poor compatibility with PowerPoint. There are also no options for working with diagrams, but the diagram from the test file still opened without distortion, which is not bad.
Another drawback is that for full operation you will need a powerful computer and high Internet speed, since Java code requires a lot of resources for execution and the speed is quite low. If we talk about creating serious presentations that require complex work with graphics, online services do not yet meet all the requirements.
The only competitor to the previous online service is ZohoShow.com, which is part of the Zoho.com project, which provides the most impressive range of office services on the Internet. And yet, unlike other successful projects, ZohoShow.com is significantly inferior to other alternative programs. Compatibility is rather declarative, PowerPoint files are greatly distorted when opened, there is no ability to work with diagrams at all, moreover, even the diagrams in the file cannot be opened.
With such primitive functionality, you can create only the most basic presentations. When working with Zoho.com products, it is preferable to use FireFox for correct code execution.
The undoubted leader in previous reviews of programs alternative to Microsoft products was NeoOffice, since it is an almost complete, but at the same time free analogue. But this time everything is different - the palm deservedly goes to Keynote 3.0. NeoOffice still implements the methods and methods imposed by Microsoft, while Keynote boldly offers new style for working on presentations. The program prioritizes creativity and makes the process of creating and editing presentations easy, enjoyable and exciting, allowing users to enjoy the process without being distracted by technical issues. It can be said that Keynote extremely successfully transferred the legendary style of the iLife suite into the serious world of office work, completely transforming the routine routine for managers.
Review of programs that can replace Microsoft PowerPointIn this article we will continue our review of programs that can replace Microsoft products on the MacOS X platform. And this time our focus is on MS PowerPoint. But before we begin the review, let's figure out what MS PowerPoint is used for and what requirements we must present to alternative programs.
MS PowerPoint is an application for creating presentations. Despite the fact that it is still a graphics program, it often happens that people try to use PowerPoint for other purposes. Namely, to create layouts of paper advertising materials or documentation. This is fundamentally wrong. The main processing element for any presentation program is a slide, and not a sheet of paper, as in word processing and layout programs. Hence the main requirement for what we should get “as an output”: a slide show equipped with a developed transition system, preferably with effects and interactivity, capable of being played using the tools of the program itself, or exported to a separate video clip in some popular format.
The presentation creation program should be able to:
Import graphic files in major common formats
allow graphic and text blocks to be freely positioned within the slide
Place or create elements such as tables and charts, buttons and text hyperlinks directly in the program itself to move to another slide, or open another file or page on the Internet
Allow you to add comments to a slide as a separate element independent from the slide itself
Add various simple graphic elements such as arrows, rectangles, circles, etc. for drawing diagrams
It is also important that the program for creating presentations is not too difficult to master. Unlike graphics applications created for professional designers (like Adobe), MS PowerPoint and its analogues are intended more for managers who need to effectively present certain information. That is, to express your ideas and developments, for example, a business plan, without going into the intricacies of working with graphics, but focusing entirely on the information itself, on creativity.
In my opinion, MS PowerPoint itself does not really satisfy the stated requirements. However, since the prevalence of MS PowerPoint is not much less widespread than Word and Excel, issues of compatibility with its format are no less important. To evaluate them, I resorted to the same method as in previous reviews - I created a test file, which we will open in all candidate programs.
We start, as always, with Apple products. Apple Keynote, starting with the second version, is included with Apple iWork with the Pages text editor, while the first version of Keynote was distributed separately. At its presentation, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that this application was created by Apple programmers on his instructions and especially for him, but the program turned out to be so successful that Apple decided to launch it commercially. This is easy to believe, because it’s quite difficult to imagine how Jobs prepared his famous presentations while torturing PowerPoint on a Mac. On the other hand, Keynote really said a new word in the genre of creating computer presentations.
If you've already seen Pages, then the concept contained in Keynote will seem familiar to you; in fact, it was first introduced there, since the first version of Pages came out later. This concept is based on the concept of patterns or patterns. Although templates are present in PowerPoint, they have never been the central point of all work on a document. Before Keynote, templates were simply pre-built documents from which users could create their own. The quality of the design of such documents in PowerPoint left much to be desired; they rather showed the range of applications of PowerPoint, the possibilities of structuring information, etc. With the advent of Keynote, everything changed.
Every template that comes with Keynote is a little masterpiece. There is a legend that Steve Jobs personally reviews all the templates offered by designers (and they are ordered from an independent design studio), and in the end no more than a quarter remains. It's hard to say how true this is, but you can immediately feel that all the templates are made conscientiously.
Secondly, a template in Keynote (although it’s still correct to say “scheme”) is a part of a document, described as its property. That is, the scheme can be changed at any time, and, attention (!), the entire document will change in accordance with the new selected scheme. Even if you are carried away by free formatting of the document, you will not have to finish anything, and the appearance of the presentation will completely change. However, if you wish, you can only change the layout of one specific slide.
Let’s give a small example by opening a file prepared for testing in PowerPoint, and at the same time we’ll check Keynote for compatibility with the Microsoft product.
As can be seen from the figure, compatibility is quite decent, although not ideal. The diagram created in PowerPoint took on a slightly different look. And although this can be fixed with one click using the Chart tab in the Inspector panel, it is still unpleasant. Also, some users complain about problems opening presentations containing comments, but I have not had to deal with this. However, you should always remember that there is no such thing as 100% compatibility. Simply because Keynote is a completely different program. It has its own data storage format, different from PowerPoint, its own ideology of working with a document, and its own set of tools, similar to Microsoft, but different. If we are looking for an alternative to PowerPoint, we need an application that can open ppt files without errors. In my opinion, Keynote is just that case - compatibility, let's say, is 98%.
Now that we've sorted out compatibility, let's get back to working with templates. Having corrected the diagram as described above, let's try to apply a new template to the document.
As can be seen from the figure, changing the background and some fonts radically changes the appearance of the document for the better. But look at the following image - the Masters button now allows us to select several formatting options for our slide. Please note that there are different formatting options for different templates. Many, of course, are similar, but there are also individual ones.
When it comes to functionality, Keynote is not much inferior to PowerPoint, but in some ways it is superior. Just look at the transition effects from one slide to another - compared to PowerPoint, this is real Hollywood. Keynote, unlike PowerPoint, does not give the impression of being a "serious" program, but the impression is deceptive. This is the merit of the Apple developers, who managed to present a serious office product as a program that is as easy to learn as iPhoto or other programs from the iLife package. Also worth mentioning is the integration of Keynote with iLife. In practice, this means you can easily insert photos from your iPhoto library, music from iTunes, and even edited movies from iMovie into your presentation, all by simply dragging them from the Media palette.
In Keynote, as later in Pages, Apple applied a new interface concept - compact, well-structured, and very visual. This concept allows the user to create complex and beautiful documents almost playfully, focusing more on the subject of the document itself than on “what button should I press to do what I intended and will it look good?”
Keynote also has advanced export functions, so you can’t call it a thing in itself. In addition to its format, it allows you to export your presentation to PowerPoint format, but do not forget that the latter may incorrectly interpret Keynote templates applied to your document. And also, PowerPoint does not support, as already mentioned, many transition effects - the presentation may lose its luster when opened. In addition, Keynote allows you to export a document as a graphic image (jpg, png, tiff), Flash animation files, QuickTime movie, html, and of course PDF, which is the central format of all MacOS X.
To summarize, if you don't need to distribute all your ready-made presentations must be in ppt format, then Keynote is definitely better. It's like comparing a large Ford pickup truck with a Ferrari, the pickup truck may have better functionality, but in the center of a big city they won't understand your choice.
In this review, unlike, I will not dwell separately on the OpenOffice package. As you remember, this application requires a special X11 mode and is not fully a MacOS X application. And besides, NeoOffice, the MacOS X-native version of the OpenOffice project, having reached its second version, has finally caught up with it in functionality. So there is no point in using OpenOffice.
Throughout our reviews, NeoOffice has been and remains a favorite. Made according to the principle “everything is the same as in MS Office, only free”, it is a real alternative to Microsoft. However, this principle is also a drawback - as I already wrote in, NeoOffice does not offer anything new, and therefore is doomed to the role of always catching up. However, the program's interface when creating a presentation is somewhat different from PowerPoint.
Demonstrating almost perfect compatibility with the PowerPoint format, NeoOffice offers a slightly different mode of operation. Unlike Keynote, where the emphasis is on the visual presentation of the presentation, NeoOffice forces you to concentrate on the structure and content of the document. Various ways document views ("structure", "notes", "thesis"), quick access to the panel for changing the slide layout force you to work in exactly this mode. Switching between these modes is organized as tabs in the main window, and not through the View menu, as is usually the case in Microsoft programs. It would seem an insignificant addition to the interface, but it puts you in a completely different mood while working: when you constantly see before your eyes that the document can be presented in a different form, and switching requires one click of the mouse, then this forces you to structure your work a little differently . Of course, this is a find by the NeoOffice developers.
NeoOffice has a developed export system, allowing you to save your slides in a variety of graphic formats, as well as in the form of a flash video. Export to PDF, implemented as a separate menu command, works much more reliably than in PowerPoint itself. However, I couldn't find an option to export the presentation as a video, which is disappointing.
But the main disadvantage of NeoOffice is still its speed. If in word processor and spreadsheet mode this was not so noticeable, then in presentation mode, where by definition a large amount of work with graphics, animation and effects is required, the “slowness” of NeoOffice came to the fore. On the iMac G5 with 512MB of memory on which I tested, NeoOffice performance was rated as "not working." So, if you really decide to use NeoOffice as your only office suite, you'll have to fork out for the latest model of Mac.
ThinkFree Office is one of the few office suites - commercial alternatives to the Microsoft suite. And on the Mac it’s the only one, because Apple iWork, with all due respect to it, has not yet reached the level of an office suite due to the lack of a spreadsheet editor in it.
Unlike its work brethren Write and Calc, the application responsible for creating presentations, ThinkFree Office Show raises complaints about its performance.
The first and main drawback: ThinkFree Office Show does not know what charts are, which is strange - after all, the mechanism for creating charts is present in Calc. When opening our test file, the diagrams turned into a graphic image (picture) with distortion. Even a chart created in Calc is copied with distortions when pasted into Show.
The second drawback is the undeveloped export system. Of the graphic formats, only jpg, png and vector svg are available. Ppt format is the internal format of ThinkFree Office Show, and there is also an option to save the presentation as html, but there is no export to PDF. Apparently the developers decided that MacOS X itself was enough, and maybe they were right. But in the menu there is a command “Export to iPod”, which none of the applications discussed in this review can boast of.
It appears that the ThinkFree Office Show developers have focused their efforts on the Write word processor and Calc spreadsheet, which have earned rave reviews in our previous reviews. But in vain, Show may turn out to be the fly in the ointment that will force potential ThinkFree Office users to turn their eyes away from this package towards other alternatives to Microsoft products.
Let me remind you that the Internet resource ThinkFree.com is an online version of the ThinkFree Office office suite. Written in Java, ThinkFree.com is currently perhaps the most powerful Internet resource providing such a service. Zoho.com, discussed below, is noticeably lagging behind, and Google and Microsoft, oddly enough for market leaders, are just starting out on this path and are catching up.
However, no matter how promising the idea of providing access to an office suite via the Internet is, it is too early to talk about actually creating presentations using this resource.
There are two drawbacks. The first is functionality online versions ThinkFree.com Show is not good enough to work properly, although it may seem impressive for the online version. So we can say that ThinkFree.com Show has all the disadvantages of the offline prototype, including the disadvantages of PowerPoint compatibility. It also cannot work with charts, although, oddly enough, charts converted to graphical images opened without distortion in our test in the online version.
The second disadvantage of the ThinkFree.com service is low speed. For full operation you will need fast internet and a powerful computer, since executing Java code always requires large computer resources. Creating presentations, which require serious work with graphics, is too early to take on the shoulders of Internet services.
Another online presentation service and, as far as I know, the only competitor to ThinkFree.com Show is ZohoShow.com. The service is part of the Zoho.com project, which currently provides the most comprehensive range of office Internet services.
Unfortunately, unlike other Zoho.com projects, ZohoShow.com is still clearly raw. Compatibility with the PowerPoint format is declarative - files open, but with great distortion. There is no ability to work with diagrams, and diagrams existing in the file “fly off”, leaving a frame.
The functionality in ZohoShow.com is low, if not primitive. You can only create a very simple presentation. Let's hope this is just the beginning. Let me also remind you that when working with products from Zoho.com, it is preferable to use the FireFox browser, since the code may not execute correctly with Safari.
In previous reviews, the palm among alternatives to Microsoft products was held by the NeoOffice package, as an almost complete, and, moreover, free alternative. However, this time it will have to give up the first place to Keynote 3.0. Unlike NeoOffice, which is not far removed from the Microsoft-imposed way of working, Keynote offers a completely new style of creating presentations. Without tormenting the user with the technical aspects of the work, he offers to fully concentrate on creativity, creating bright and effective presentations. In fact, you could say that Keynote brought the now legendary iLife style to the serious world of office work. If this approach is also successfully developed in Pages and in the long-awaited spreadsheet from Apple, then this could create a real revolution in the world of office suites.
