Presentation Maker

Presentation Maker


Introduction
One of the things I used my Series 3a for was to prepare presentations in Word while travelling, and print them out later. That was a bit tedious, as there's little in the way of special features (graphics, tables, etc.) to help in the process. The extra benefits of EPOC32 make Word far more useful in this role, and Presentation Maker simplifies the whole thing further. Psion released it as one of their first add-on applications for the Series 5, aimed primarily at the business user. It comes on a single 1·44 Mb DOS format floppy with the SIS files for the main application and associated clipart in MBM (S5 graphics files) format. These can be transferred to the Series 5 with PsiRisc or ArcLink5 and installed from the Control Panel, meaning that the dependence on PsiWin running on a PC has been removed. There are also some convertors to plug into PsiWin to transfer presentations between the Psion and Powerpoint on a PC.
As I use Powerpoint at work, I did try moving some of my less graphical, more text oriented, presentations onto my S5 (and the Geofox One) to see what happened to them. The results were very good, given that a lot of the slides use features that aren't supported (backgrounds, dissolve effects, etc.). However that isn't the point of this review, as I want to look at it as a stand-alone application (as there isn't a way of exchanging files with anything on the Acorn platform).

In Use
Starting a new presentation or slide, you get the choice of built-in templates for the slide. These allow you to pick a title, sketch, agenda, graph (one or two), bulleted list or blank page. You can also add items from Sheet, Word, Record, Sketch etc. to existing slides.


Choosing From the Slide Templates

My presentations make heavy use of bulleted lists, and I suppose most folk are the same. Consequently this is the aspect I was most interested in. Picking a Bulleted List from the template has two regions already defined into which you can type. A standard bullet is inserted every time you press <Return> at the end of a line in the second section, ready for the start of the next line. I'm used to being able to press <Tab> to indent the line further and change the bullet to a smaller one, but here the bullet stays where it is while the line is indented and changes to a smaller font size.


The Standard Bulleted List

I don't think that looks as neat as indenting the bullet as well, and there doesn't seem to be any way of changing the behaviour easily. I did try to use a simple text frame to mimic the effect, but it falls down if one of the lines is long enough to wrap onto the line below, and also doesn't automatically change the font size.


An Attempt to Get Something Better

Within its limitations, it works simply and well, and the other views of the presentation give a good degree of control over it. The multi-slide view helps in rearranging the slides into the desired order, which is just as well as you can't choose where to insert a new slide: it always goes to the end of the presentation and has to be moved if you want it somewhere else.


The Multi Slide View Gives an Overall View

It is easy to copy a slide and paste it in several times to avoid having to type the title each time, and that goes some way towards compensating for the fact that you can't define your own templates.

The outline view is potentially the most useful, as it allows you to rattle away entering points onto each slide, and then edit and rearrange them afterwards.


The Outline View

This view only shows the bulleted lists and titles: any embedded graphics (such as the picture on my first page and the agenda on the third) are shown as small icons instead of their true contents.

There are some limitations to the package, which you should be aware of if you're hoping to prepare more sophisticated presentations than simple text ones:

Conclusions
If you want to use the S5 to prepare text-based presentations for printing out onto acetates, then this is a good way of doing it. You can also print four of your slides per page so that you can give handouts to your audience without using vast amounts of paper. It is far more flexible than using Word, with the strange exception of not being able to put frames around text items, and not allowing user-defined styles. Certainly I'd prefer to have these rather than using the feature provided to include sound clips in a presentation!

Geofox have been working with Purple Software (the authors of Presentation Maker) to produce a special version of the software designed for direct projection, as this version doesn't have a "slideshow" view. That has now been released in a package with a VGA adaptor card that plugs into the PCMCIA slot on the Geofox One. Called Colorshow and costing £145·00 (inc.VAT), it allows presentations to be displayed (in colour) via a video projector straight from the palmtop machine. I'll be reviewing it in Palmtop Magazine shortly.

Presentation Maker costs £49·95, and comes on a single floppy disc with a slim, 12 page manual.


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The pages on this site are all © John Woodthorpe, and are my personal opinions. All trademarks are acknowledged.