Slideless

This week has been full of distractions. The Yankees are on a skid, the events in Iran have me glued in front of Twitter and to top it off we are now into the stretch of Texas weather that makes one want to do as little as possible, its in the 100's everyday now and will be for the next few weeks. At any rate I am a little tardy with my post, sorry.

Besides being late I do not have a lot of news. The new Softless Netbook loaded with Ubuntu is in back order hell somewhere so we are in a holding pattern with those updates.

On the replacement for PowerPoint quest there has been a lot of traveling but not a lot of getting anywhere. I am at the point where lowering my expectations may be in order. So far I have tried four different packages. None of them have really met what I would call replacement level capabilities. Maybe they work so good that I am missing something. My basic requirement is to be able to convert an existing PPT and have it run with little modification. I have not found that. I think my definition of basic is probably a little skewed. Most of my presentations have at least some animations, even if it is simple slide transitions, none of the packages, strike that, none of the services I have tried thus far have made it through this process without some problems.

I hesitate to list the services just because I am not complete with my evals, but I suppose if I limit my comments to my importing experiences that is fair.

As I mentioned last week Google Presentation was first. As I also mentioned, it has its issues in some areas, and importing a PPT file is not different. I am not sure why, but it can import a simple slide deck with no animations, and it comes in completely formatted. But add just one animation and the same slide that formatted correctly is now jumbled with letters and graphics over written. No animation at all, but this is a limitation of Google Presentation as a whole, not just the import feature. I am still not impressed with Googles effort here.

280Slides was a waste of my time. I logged on, I tried to import, the service never came back. I tried again, same results. Third time was the point where I closed Firefox and moved on. Maybe I caught them on a bad day.

Empressr. I have to say that what did import came in formatted correctly. But the problem here was some things simply did not come over. I am not sure where they are, but I lost several pictures and text blocks. There was nothing exceptional about them, in fact other slides with similar items came across fine. The quality of the import was pretty good except for the losses. Animations of the slide transitions were created by Empressr, OK, but I didn't ask for them. None of the text or picture animations made it in the import, I think this is also a limitation of Empressor, at least the trial version I have.

SlideRocket was my fourth try. While the import did not work exactly right it was the closest by far. The problem came with the order of animations, some of my text "appears" were out of order. The text that I wanted to "appear" first actually "appeared" last in some cases. Sometimes the animation happened in reverse, in other words, all my text showed up, then as the animation ran it "disappeared". I think that this is probably something I can fix with some tweaking on the imported show, I will keep you updated on how much effort it takes.

So there you have it. Four tries, four not so perfect results. While I think the four services listed above have done a good job, they all failed to meet what I think are a reasonable first test, import my old stuff so I can use it with my new stuff. Stay tuned as I give up and just try to use my new stuff and create a Softless presentation from scratch.

Finally I am assured that the LINUX Netbook is on the way, look for my updates on that as well.