I was watching a seminar presentation today, and was realising how patchy the diagrams looked in PowerPoint. And I remembered how long I spent trying to make a presentation that I gave recently, really beautifully organic. Then the thought occurred to me: wouldn’t it be great if Xara could be used to give presentations? And then I started to think some more (instead of listening to what was being said).

Xara can do DTP layout, multi pages, flash animation, and is object orientated. Most of the ingredients for a PowerPoint-like direction are already in place. And what better way to advertise Xara than to use it to show people presentations?

I suspect a new document type might be required, analogous to an animation document type, and the frame gallery could be used to see each slide.

Done well, all of Xara’s advanced graphical functionality could be used directly within the program, without the need to export flash files/animated gifs for simple effects, e.g. fading text in, and fading from one slide to another. It could even be possible to have an internally referenced advanced flash-like animation type (i.e. flash without the limitations e.g. using blending etc.) for complex animations; a pre-made xar file animation in which the advanced flash-like file is made can be referenced to load as an object on the page in the presentation. It seems like there's the potential for a supreme (graphically at least) presentation package using Xara, which would further help reach additional audiences.