BY: Rich Castagna
Back in the good old days, you could cobble a quick presentation by banging away at the typewriter and then copying your pages to transparencies. You could practically do it in your sleep. Then your audience could catch up on their sleep when your less than artful slides hit the screen. With ASAP, putting together a presentation requires even less effort--but the polished results are far from snooze-inducing.
ASAP, which I tested in beta, is designed for the occasional presenter or for those who can't commit the time to learn one of the more potent presentation packages. The program's point-and-click approach is a panacea for the artistically impaired.
The program's clean interface is dominated by the work area with its three tabs--one for a presentation outline, a second to assemble and view slides, and the last to run your slide show. Most of each tab's related activities are accessible via a handful of toolbar buttons.
You start out on the Outline tab where a fresh page is ready. Next to the page symbol, you type in your first slide's title. Click on the Insert Point button and enter the first major topic. To fill in the rest of the slide's information, you click on the Insert Sub-Point button for each additional line. After typing the slide text, you can drag the lines around to rearrange them or change their emphasis. For the second and all subsequent slides, just click on the Insert Page button.
With your outline complete, you switch to the Preview tab where--voila!--ASAP has turned your jottings into presentation-quality slides. If you like the style choices that ASAP has made, you're done. Otherwise, it's possible to change the look of your slides by choosing from ASAP's 22 layout templates, 13 design templates and 17 color schemes. You can select from among these by scanning the thumbnail representations and clicking on them or by dragging them onto the slide. You could--given the time and the desire to build the perfect presentation--click your way through the nearly 5,000 combinations that these presets provide.
If you've already composed your outline in Microsoft Word, you can import it lock, stock and Roman numerals into ASAP. Without making you retype a single subtopic, the program will turn your outline into a presentation. ASAP will accept text, .RTF and WordPerfect files, too. And if you tend to work along your own lines, you can eschew the outline altogether and type directly on the slide templates.
ASAP knows that words alone can spell disaster in a presentation. You can put pizzazz in your presentation by pasting pictures on slides. ASAP accepts seven graphics file formats: .PCX, .BMP, .WMF, .GIF, .TIF, .EPS and .DIB. You can also use graphics as backgrounds or as logos that appear on all slides, and import WordArt text effects from Microsoft Word.
Tables and charts are also well accommodated by ASAP. When you select Insert/Special/Chart, ASAP switches you to Excel in its chart mode. You can create any Excel chart based on spreadsheet data and it will be plugged into your ASAP presentation slide. If you make changes on the Excel sheet that affect the chart, the copy in your presentation will reflect those changes.
Similarly, you can add a table to a presentation by copying it from Word and pasting it onto a blank slide. The inserted table retains its format, but its content can be edited in ASAP. A quick click on a layout thumbnail will reorient a table by swapping its columns and rows. If you have a long list of items on a slide, ASAP will automatically break it up into snaking columns with bullet graphics highlighting each entry. If the list items' sequence is important, you can click on the Show/Hide Numbers button to replace the bullets with sequential numbering. After you add or delete items, ASAP automatically rearranges and resizes them for the best fit on the slide.
If you choose ASAP over one of the heftier presentation programs you do give up some snappy features like fancy transition effects. But you'll save yourself some grief (and even gnashing of teeth), and you might have the time to read that trashy novel you brought along.
--Info File--
ASAP
Price: $99 (street)
In Brief: ASAP provides a lickety-split route from ideas to polished presentation.
Software Publishing Corp.
800-234-2500, 408-988-7558
by: James E. Powell
Easygoing, yet sophisticated, Freelance Graphics for Windows 95 is the Fred Astaire of presentation software. The new version epitomizes ease of use and exceptional power. Help, tips and advice are there at every step--even in the beta I tested-- from selecting a template to culling clip art from the gallery.
To create a new presentation with Freelance, choose a presentation type--Financial Review or Brainstorming, for example--from the list of over 30. Most of these alternatives are designed for serious business presentations. You can also select styles for your presentation slides, such as a one-chart slide, bulleted list or organization chart. The quality and variety of the templates is extremely rich.
After you determine the type of presentation you'll pitch, Freelance suggests a look that fits your message. The program did such a good job of matching the medium to the message that I couldn't argue with any of its design choices.
But if your taste differs from the program's, simply pick another look. Your next step is to settle on the content--an overview, title page, agenda and so on. Freelance creates the slides with the familiar "Click here" to add text placeholders that you replace with your own words. That's all it takes to build a good- looking, professional presentation. But if you want to make changes, there are tools for making global changes to the templates--called SmartMaster layouts--such as adding your logo to each slide. If you must create a logo, Freelance's new toolbar pops up to help you add lines andshapes that hold text, connectors and clip art.
Preview slides in other presentations and "borrow" them for inclusion in your current work by clicking or dragging and dropping the slides from a browser window. A new diagramming tool includes over 100 ready-made business diagrams, such as pyramids, Gantt charts, branching diagrams and network models. It took only a couple of mouse clicks to create a hub-and-spoke diagram and a few more to add my text to the spokes.
Because Freelance is a Windows 95 app, you can right-click on any object to get a pop-up menu that includes the option to set the selected item's properties. For text, you can control the color, font, size, alignment and style. You can also choose bullet attributes from the 42 predefined types and add animation effects. The property window offers tips, and the online help is equally accessible and well done. If Freelance doesn't hear from your keyboard for a while, it assumes you're puzzled and suggests clicking the Guide Me button that offers help for the tasks you're likely to want, depending on the selected object.
Freelance's standard presentation features are offered in tabbed dialog boxes. There's a slide sorter and an outliner--de rigueur for presentation programs--and you can add speaker notes by just clicking on a button.
Using a simple process to set timing and sequence, you can add animation to bullets and clip art. While you can't control the path text takes to get to its final position, there are enough animation options to satisfy most users. To add more action, you can include movie clips in your presentation.
The program has a spell checker and a macro recorder/player, and it supports LotusScript, the company's somewhat complex scripting language. You can flip and rotate objects, and group or ungroup them. Most of your choices are shown in preview windows. Rulers and snap-to grids make it easier to get everything in place. Freelance supports OLE 2.0 and comes with a slide show packager for distributing runtime versions of your presentations.
This version also adds team computing features. It's easy to add comments that look like sticky notes using your own text or predefined phrases. Freelance frames the text with your name and the date. Distribute presentations via e-mail with your comments or post them to a Notes database. When reviewing a presentation, you can use tools like straight-line orfor highlighting areas. As the author, you can pick the reviewers whose comments you want to see or hide all comments. Whether you send separate copies of your presentation to each reviewer or choose instead to route a single copy, Freelance will consolidate the comments or store them all in a single file on the network.
Remote users can dial up and view your presentation using Microsoft's Remote Access Services (RAS). As the presenter, you control the sequencing of the presentation while simultaneously viewing your speaker notes, which the audience can't see.
When you print your Freelance presentation, you're prompted to adjust settings--such as shrinking screen images--to fit a printed page. Output is outstanding, and Freelance does an excellent job converting color slides to black-and-white output. Before printing, you can view monochrome versions of your slides or use the print preview feature.
Freelance is a pleasure. It's easy to use, with excellent diagramming tools, clip-art handling and SmartMaster templates. And when it comes to team-effort presentations, it simply overshadows its competition.
--Info File--
Freelance Graphics for Windows 95
Price: Not available at press time.
In Brief: Freelance is a comprehensive, yet easy-to-use, presentation package. Its excellent SmartMaster templates make creating new presentations a breeze.
Lotus Development Corp.
800-343-5414, 617-577-8500