PowerPoint Competitor

[dcahall]

I would like to see someone like Xara come out with a competitor to PowerPoint. Here is my wish list:

• Drawing capability like Xtreme
• Motion and transition capabilities like Flash
• Presenter control (like the ability to use a remote control), like PowerPoint

I am not very proficient at Adobe Scripting but I have tried to add some code to a Flash movie that would respond to the same type of controls (+/-, forward, previous, space bar and all of the ways PPT will allow you to navigate your slides) and nothing worked very well. While MS has improved the graphics quite a bit with Office 2007 their graphics are still kind of weak and the control over moving objects on the screen, embeding video and etc. is very weak (not all that flexible).

With all of this, I do not see any vendors stepping up to the plate and competing with MS. Yes, Apple has iWorks (or what evr it is called these days) but PPT is still be far the most used presentation software on the market. I would think that a good stiff competitor could make a lot of headway.

[Soquili]

I'm sure that if Xara were you decide to make a competitor to PowerPoint it would be far superiour.

From my experience most businesses are reluctant to use anything other than their Office suite of applications even when better applications are available.

[Albacore]

I agree with what Bill states here that PP has this market sown up. As it stands at the moment you could just about do it at this moment in time. There are still some problems as you have mention "presenter control" would be a large one. Have a look as this discussion from a thread a while back as well as some airy fairy ideas there are some good points: http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=27526

The way I do it is to use PDF with the help of InDesign after exporting from Xara as PDF. This means that you have to have InDesign CS3 and Acro 8 prof. and a bit of knowledge of actions and behaviours but you can get it to work like power point presentation. As ID excepts transparencies and feathering your designs can be really adventurous and really construct it like a inter-active magazine. This is one of my main jobs at the moment as I work for the NHS in Scotland sending out inter-active magazines, instructional booklets and examples of scans with most of the input being vector orientated instead of bitmap.

[dcahall]

Enjoyed the thread you mentioned........

For those of us who give a lot of presentations, the control part is the big one that any other tool misses. I am never "tied to the podium" which most alternatives assume.

Guess there is just no hope.....everyone has "conceded" to MS (except Apple which has a very small market share). Maybe MS will include some nifty stuff in Office 14 but I doubt it.

[Big Frank]

Guess there is just no hope.....everyone has "conceded" to MS

Nope. OpenOffice continues to make headway into the MS-dominated office productivity sector.

It is extremely difficult to estimate the market share of OpenOffice.org because OpenOffice.org can be freely distributed via download sites including mirrors, peer-to-peer networks, CDs, Linux distributions and so forth. Nevertheless, the OpenOffice.org tries to capture key adoption data in a market share analysis.

Although Microsoft Office retained 95% of the general market as measured by revenue as of August 2007, OpenOffice.org and StarOffice had secured 15-20% of the business market as of 2004. The OpenOffice.org web site reported more than 98 million downloads as of September 2007.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOff...g#Market_share

Those figures are at least 18 months out of date and I don't know any Internet of computer professional who is not openly encouraging people to use OO. Now imagine if a forward-thinking company were to integrate a real, viable and far superior alternative to PowerPoint into OO, but one that supported all of PowerPoint's protocols. I suspect that that would get it a lot of positive attention and such publicity would do it nothing but good in selling its commercial products.

In my opinion, anyway

[steve.ledger]

I agree, Open Office is great and is a terrific alternative which I make known to all purchasers of new PC's - many of whom take advantage of it's availability.
But there are many customers who reject it because it scares them to learn something else, or they need to have MS Office for work or student requirements. Saving a couple hundred dollars is not enough incentive.
The issue to consider here (at least) is the requirements of the State education system.
Schools insist that students use MS Word, Excel or Power Point etc for their work.
This makes certain of full compatibility between work done at home and with the school PC software installations and of course with IT education in the classroom.
State Schools do not like to use alternatives.
This training 'imprints' each generation of students to only use and accept MS Office.
The mind-set is carried over into the business sector and perpetuated when knowledge and experience with MS Office is a requirement for job applications.
Not many (there would be some alternative thinkers, but very few) employers accept OpenOffice skills as being a useful alternative to MS Office knowledge. It's just too hard to change.

This may not be the case in other countries.