Office 2000 Premium Part III: Access, PowerPoint and the Small Business Tools PowerPoint Has Got the Point Douglas Smith
What's New? PowerPoint 2000 is a program that allows users to create presentations for audiences in face-to-face meetings, in different locations or on the Web. The ease of use features and speed improvements allow you to build Web-based presentations quickly. PowerPoint 2000 is backward compatible. A nice new twist is the ability to facilitate real-time collaboration with the NetShow server and NetMeeting conference software. This offers users collaboration ability over the net. There is also a new Tri-Pane View for ease of use and much better international support.
If you are new to PowerPoint you will notice a slew of pre-built presentations that you can start with to build your presentation. The Wizard is also there to help you out right away. Power users will appreciate the speed of this version along with the Web integration.
New features in PowerPoint 2000 include HTML as Native File Format (allowing you to save to and read directly from HTML files), the ability to preserve features in HTML format, Web Graphic Optimization, and Dual HTML Output Format, which allows the user to save presentations in a dual v3-v4 mode for browser integration. There are also new HTML Output options and the ability to automatically re-size your slides to fit any window and a new button to launch your presentation in full screen mode.
You can now schedule online broadcasts using Outlook messaging. Others can watch your broadcast during or after using the Event Web Page feature. You now have Presentation on Demand, Online Meeting, Auto-Fit Text for auto re-sizing to fit into a place-holder and you can now add tables to your creations without using Word or Excel. Some of the other additions are Graphical Bullets, Auto-Numbered Bullets, Multiple Monitor support, Animated GIFs and a brand new Presentation Assistant. As you can see a lot of thought has gone into this version both in ease of use and features.
The Good and the Bad Like the new additions in most of the Office package, we especially like what we see with HTML support and Web based integration. One real nice feature is the real time collaboration which talked to NetMeeting allowing you to conduct real-time meetings to other locations with ease. The Wizards helped with setting up our presentations without searching through the help files or user manual.
Because a lot of users use laptops attached to viewers to project presentations in big meetings, having the new Laptop Integration proved priceless, allowing us to disable the Windows screensaver or the laptop's low-power screen mode to avoid any interruptions. This is a great addition to say the least! Now, we didn't like the size of some of the presentations that were produced because they became very large (while still holding very little content). While building presentations and flipping through the slides we noticed that we would sometime flip past the slide that we really wanted and then found it difficult to get back.
How Does It All Stack Up? PowerPoint 2000 is by far the best of the Presentation software packages on the market. With its strong program integration and Web savvy you just won't find a better tool for the job. There are several programs that come in a strong second: Corel Presentation, Harvard Graphics, and FreeLance compete but just don't have the ability to do all of the things that PowerPoint can do, or as easily.
