Presentation software for the Mac
I recently found myself on the schedule to present at PodCamp 3 Boston, and found myself in a bit of a quandary. What should I choose for presentation software? What would be compatible with most AV setups for Mac or PC and what would be fastest and easiest to use?
I had one presentation option on my computer: PowerPoint from Office for Mac 2004. I hadn’t played with it in a while, but I remembered that it was a bit clunky and slow to use. I had heard mixed reviews about Keynote, part of the iWork suite by Apple, but haven’t found a need for the purchase yet, so off I went looking for free solutions that might be better than PowerPoint.
Snapper was one of the first tools that popped up on my radar. This ended up being more of a screen casting tool than a straight up presentation tool, but it still made it into my permanent rotation for the future. The ability to make tutorials on the fly is excellent and it turns these demos into little movies – very handy, but not quite what I needed. If you want to try it out it is $19.99 to buy and you can make one screen cast for free in the demo.
ConceptDraw came recommended, but at $249 after the 30 day trial I knew it was out of my range, so I skipped it. NovaMind was another paid program that received good reviews but that was out of my price range (or lack of price range). Starting to get frustrated, I abandoned recommendations and turned to open source directories for a little old fashioned trial and error.
In my quest for Open Source presentation software for the Mac I found several titles for Linux, very few for Windows, and… few real contenders for Mac. KeyJNote and BOSS both get high marks, but both are made for Linux. The search continued, while the time for my presentation drew near.
Enter OpenOffice. I had tried it before, but found it lacking. My research revealed it had gotten an overhaul, so I downloaded it again. Am I glad I did! The presentation software portion of the suite, Impress, beat the pants off of PowerPoint. The one glitch was that it didn’t handle WMA audio files smoothly, but really, on my Mac I’m never using those so… who cares?
It is easy to use, it makes beautiful slides and comes with plenty of clip art for the lazy among us (cough, me, cough). It has full integration for movies and audio, as well as ways to animate sides and work with fonts and graphics easily. I was impressed, and completely happy with the download. I’m hoping it works with Snapper also, since my next presentation needs to demonstrate software.
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July 25th, 2008
Keynote’s great. You can use a trial of it if you want. I don’t know about those reviews you mention; Amazon.com reviews of iWork I’ve seen are all like 4 and 5 stars, and they usually mention that Keynote is the best part.
Use a trial of it http://www.apple.com/iwork/trial/ and you’ll love it.