One computer can be worth a million words when you want to share information with customers and colleagues. It's dramatic and cost-effective.
The computer can be your desktop or portable IBM or compatible PC, your Macintosh, even your Apple II, although in most cases you should add a color monitor. Then add some fine presentation software, and you're in business! Presentation programs help you organize everything you want to show and tell into a dramatic, artistic slide show. Then they display the slides right on your computer monitor.You can prepare text and tables in a word processor. You can compose projections using a spreadsheet program. You can generate graphs using display graphics software. The presentation program organizes all these images into a unified show.
To do it, the program gives you a choice of two techniques. The first is file import. It can be a file made by 1-2-3, SuperCalc5, Micro-soft Word, or PC Paint - any program the presentation software knows how to read. It converts each file you designate into a `computer slide.'
The second technique it uses is screen capture. It makes a computer slide of what you're looking at onscreen, even if it's the combined output of several programs. To signal the program to capture that screen, you hit a hot key. The program makes an almost-exact copy of menus, data, words, pictures or what-have-you.
You can mix these captured screens with imported data files or rely on them alone. Their candid appearance lends believability and drama to your slide show.
The better presentation programs also generate special effects including dissolves and wipes. You can have one image dissolve away as its replacement dissolves into view. You can select a line-dissolve, ripple-dissolve, or grainy gravel-dissolve. You can wipe away one picture - horizontally, vertically, or obliquely - and, at the same time, wipe in its replacement.
Some presentation programs let you control the length of each dissolve or wipe. They also let you specify how long a particular slide should remain onscreen. The less expensive packages stick to less variable routines.
Most packages also let you advance slides one at a time manually as you give a show, so you don't need to plan ahead for the timing. Xerox Presents even lets you move backward.
A previous column reviewed PC Emcee, a deluxe hardware-and-software presentation manager that adds a remote slide advancer. It also includes a pointer and a tape recording coordinator. (Computer Support Corp. 214-661-8960.)
If you own a Macintosh, you can select from dozens of good presentation programs. For $500 there's the very fine Cricket Pre-sents, from which Xerox evolved its product. For a hundred bucks less, Microsoft's PowerPoint does a little less. It doesn't create flashy wipes and dissolves or let you vary the slides' onscreen time.
Slide Show Magician from Magnum is down in the $60 range, and well worth the price. Magnum also sells a pretty decent sound effects add-on package. (Magnum, 818-700-0510.)
Xerox Presents was written by programmers at Cricket for IBM or compatible PCs. It costs $500 and requires a modern, well-outfitted computer: an IBM AT, 80286 or 80386 type with 20M of hard disk space, 640K memory, mouse and a graphics display adapter suitable for use with Windows.
The program generates printed presentation sheets and overhead transparencies. It lets you use your screen cursor as a pointer during slide shows. Through a tie-in with a slidemaker, you can also transmit your show over phone lines to be converted, overnight, into photographic slides.
Show Partner from Brightbill-Roberts can be run on even a floppy drive IBM or compatible PC. At $100, it does most of what Xerox Presents does, only with a bit less flexibility and variety. Besides selling as a stand-alone, it's incorporated into Lotus Freelance and bundled with Microsoft Mouse and other packages. (Brightbill-Roberts, 315-474-3400.)
Show Partner has one unique, very valuable feature: a small program you're free to copy and distribute along with copies of your on-disk slide shows. That way, you can send your presentation on a disk to anybody with a computer. Imagine the impact when a client opens the mail and finds your pitch letter, a disk, and the instructions, "Just stick this into any IBM type PC and type WOW. When you're done being wowed, call me!"
If you own an IBM PC or compatible, here's how to test the value of presentation software for less than a hundred bucks: Try to get hold of Version 1 of Ability (not the more expensive, fancier Version 2). Years ago, Ability bowed as an integrated package: word processor, spreadsheet, graph maker, and more. It also had the ability to generate computerized slide shows with special effects from its spreadsheets, graphics and word processing.
The program is crude as today's presentation programs go. It's been through several companies and we can't say its present owner is rock solid. But if you find a copy on a retailer's shelf, it's cheap, easy to learn and a fair test of whether you should be making computer presentations.
Copyright 1989 P/K Associates Inc., 4343 W Beltline Hwy, Madison WI 53711.