Ever created a PowerPoint that everyone in your organization wanted a copy of? Sure you could go ahead and clog up your corporate email server with the 200MB + file or you could just convert your PowerPoint to a smaller flash file with iSpring and publish it to an internal or external website (slideboom account required) for others to view.
Converting your PowerPoint presentation to a flash movie couldn't be any easier as the iSpring installation puts the conversion buttons right in your PowerPoint menu bar. In addition to the one click conversion iSpring also allows for some customization such as generating HTML codes, looped and automatic playback, slide advance via mouse click as well as changing the duration of the slide.
iSpring comes in 3 flavors ranging from the free version which we tested on up to the Ultra version which allows the creation of E-learning content to additional playback controls. In our testing we found the free version more than adequate for most PowerPoint presentations.
So before you send that PowerPoint thru your company email, try converting it with iSpring instead.
Export to PPT, PPS, PDF, and ODP. You've been able to export files as HTML for a while, but the addition of PowerPoint and PDF export brings Zoho Show a bit closer to being a true PowerPoint replacement
You can now import images from Picasa (Zoho Show already supported Flickr importing)
Support for up to 50 undo/redo actions
Support for 9 new languages: Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Portguese, Spanish, and Swedish.
Create contact groups for sharing your presentations with
Copy and paste slides from one presentation to another
Enhanced remote presentation user inteface
Advanced options for embedding presentations on a web site
You can see a demo presentation highlighting the new features after the jump.
The first thing you'll probably notice about the new web-based presentation creator, 280Slides, is that it looks an awful lot like Apple's Keynote. As great as Keynote is, 280Slides has a few advantages: it's free and it's web-based. It's got all the features you would expect from good presentation software: you can present in full-screen mode straight from the web, download your slides, or share your presentation to SlideShare. Vimeo and Youtube integration let you add video to the mix, too.
We can already see 280slides saving numerous butts at conferences. Equipment failure? No big deal, just borrow a computer (any platform will do!) and pull your stuff from the web. Presentations were a good candidate for the next desktop function to hop aboard the "cloud computing" bandwagon and go web-based, and the folks at 280 North have pulled it off with style and functionality. Frankly, we're a little relieved that we'll never again have to ask, "Hey, does this machine have PowerPoint?"
It's Microsoft's world and we're all just living in it. As much as you may try to pretend this is true, it becomes readily apparent any time somebody launches a Microsoft Office competitor. Because the first question isn't "does it have all of the features I'd expect from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint?" No, the first question is "can it open MS Office documents and save documents in Office formats?"
Up until recently the answer for Google's online office suite, Google Docs was "kind of." While you could import Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files with no problem, there was no way to export Google Presentation documents as PowerPoint presentations. Now Google has finally rolled out a "save as PPT" feature for presentations. You've always been able to save Word and Excel files.
Google has also added a new saved searches feature which lets you access searches for keywords, document types, or other features from your sidebar.
Google promises a feature-packed 2008 for Google Docs and we believe them. Not even a week into the new year, Google Docs has already implemented some new features. The most striking additions affect Google Presentations, the newest arm of Google Docs. Although we were impressed with Google Presentations when it debuted a few months ago, there was definitely room for improvement.
What stuck out to us the most was Google Presentation's inability to export a presentation as a .PPT file. While you can't export presentations as a PPT file, you can now easily embed presentations into your blog or website.
Take a look at this presentation we made with Google Docs to see some of the other features.
Online office suite Zoho has rolled out Zoho Show 2.0. Probably our favorite part of that sentence is the fact that Show and 2.0 rhyme. Try saying it out loud. Fun, isn't it?
But seriously, brings much of the power of Microsoft PowerPoint to a web based application. In fact, there are some things that you can do with Zoho Show that you can't do with PowerPoint. For example, you can embed a presentation on a web site, or invite a group of people to watch a presentation live in real time while sharing comments in a chat window.
We covered Live Documents, the new online office documents competition last month, that is about to make a move to steal some market share aware from Zoho, ThinkFree and Google.
Live Documents has released some screen grabs from its interface, giving a little more insight into what they are all about. The Flash based interfaces do resemble what Microsoft currently has on the market, but add the ability to collaborate. Screenshots include Presentations, Spreadsheets and Documents.
Live Documents does reference Microsoft, and Microsoft's Office applications quite a bit when talking about its own suite, and the look and feel closely resembles what MS offers, so we have to assume that they have relied heavily on Office as a starting point. Is this a bad thing? Not if you're looking to quickly build and sell the business.
We'll have to test Live Documents when it becomes readily available to see what its winning points are, and whether or not it will become a major player in the online office space.
Microsoft Office 2007 may include a bunch of nifty updates from previous versions of Microsoft's office suite. But it also includes new document formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. In other words, it causes a bunch of headaches when an Office 2007 user sends files to Office 2003 or OpenOffice.org users.
There are a bunch of services that will convert the new .xlsx, .docx, and .pptx files to old fashioned .xls, .doc, and .ppt files. But Microsoft has a solution for anyone who just needs to read documents without editing them.
This summer Microsoft release a compatibility update allowing Office 2003 and earlier customers to open the new file formats. It turns out that update also lets you use the free Word Viewer 2003 to read .docx files. Now Microsoft has also released PowerPoint Viewer 2007 with support for .pptx files.
There's no update to Excel Viewer 2003 yet, but we're guessing it's just a matter of time.
Google's long-rumored and eagerly anticipated PowerPoint clone has finally shipped. Although we've only had a chance to have a first look, here are some impressions:
Google has done a very good job of making this new Presentation application (based on code from Zenter) fit in with Docs and Spreadsheets. It looks right at home, and the functionality is about what you would expect from another Google App. File versioning and collaboration functions work exactly like they do for Docs and Spreadsheets, which is to say just fine.
If you have a Mac with a remote (and almost all of them ship with one these days), you might have been slightly dismayed to realize that other than controlling media playback there's not a lot you can do with it. As usual, someone has solved this problem.
iRed Lite is a little utility that you can run on your Mac that will listen to commands from your remote and control other programs, like iPhoto, Keynote, PowerPoint, or basically anything else you choose. In our experience configuration can be a little finicky (we never did get the Mouse Control plugin to work properly), but overall it performs as advertised in its current beta state.
Hot on the heels of today's new iLife suite, iWork '08 comes to the table too. Whilst new Keynote, and Pages, features are expected, the most hotly tipped question was "Would Apple bring out an Excel rival"? Behold Numbers and so much more.
Why develop a new web-based tool for your arsenal when you can afford to just buy a company already working on the problem? And why stop at one, when you could buy two?
It's no secret that Google is developing and online PowerPoint clone/killer to add to its suite of online office tools. In April, the company acquired online presentation company Tonic Systems. And now the company has picked up Zenter as well.
Zenter was working on its own online slideshow application, which was in private beta before the website went dark and was replaced with a notice that "Google has acquired Zenter." Back in March, TechCrunch described Zenter as PowerPoint, with the added ability to add web images and other content to presentations.
Last week, Google added a new slideshow viewer to Gmail, allowing you to view PowerPoint email attachments online. But there's still no publicly available Google service for creating presentations.
If you are a regular user of Microsoft Office, and the Box.net storage platform, you are going to love this new feature that makes storing and accessing your docs online an easy alternative to Google's Docs and Spreadsheets.
The Box.net team has just completed work on an Office On Demand feature for Word users that enables an easy way to save Word, Powerpoint, Excel and Access files directly into Box.net storage accounts.
The application is only available for Windows XP and Vista users. It adds a "Save to Box.net" button to the application toolbar, that when clicked, instantly uploads the file. This new feature is great if you are constantly switching between multiple computers, no more flash keys or manual uploading required.
ThinkFree has launched a few different ways for people to startup their own little applications and mashups.
We covered the company last year when it returned from the dead and began offering a web based application suite. ThinkFree now has a plugin available that was released yesterday that gives Wordpress bloggers the ability to drop in MS Office documents, spreadsheets and presentations that can be viewable even if the end viewer does not have the associated Office or Acrobat applications installed. This opens up the ability for bloggers to drop in a powerpoint presentation into their blog posts, or embed excel spreadsheets of information.
The company has also announced their Viewer API which gives people the opportunity to create mashups and applications using the Viewer utility. ThinkFree wants to get the ball rolling with web service companies who they hope will create mashups and applications using the utility. With the API, designers can integrate Viewer files, doc's, xls, or ppt files directly into an online application, giving end users, regardless of Operating systems or plugins, the ability to view files.
ThinkFree is also working on a document exchange product called ThinkFree Docs that has been described as a Flickr for Office files. Through this new location ThinkFree will enable content creators to read, share, get feedback, and source office documents. There is a demo up online now, but the actual site will be up with a redesign in the near future.
Australian researchers have found that the human brain doesn't do a very good job of processing audio and visual information at the same time. But in pretty much every business meeting or school lecture you've been to in the last few years, you've probably found yourself struggling to listen to a speaker at the same time as bullet points flashed across a PowerPoint presentation.
Rather than driving the point home, the PowerPoint slides might be distracting you from what the speaker is saying. It's possible that the speaker is also distracting you from what's on the slides, but given the choice between paying attention to some bullet points or a human being, we're guessing you'll get more out of the lecture.
Ever created a PowerPoint that everyone in your organization wanted a copy of? Sure you could go ahead and clog up your corporate email server with the 200MB + file or you could just convert your PowerPoint to a smaller flash file with iSpring and publish it to an internal or external website (slideboom account required) for others to view.
Google promises a feature-packed 2008 for 
If you have a Mac with a remote (and almost all of them ship with one these days), you might have been slightly dismayed to realize that other than controlling media playback there's not a lot you can do with it. As usual, someone has solved this problem. 
