Online Alternative to PowerPoint
Friday, December 30th 2005 | Ismael Ghalimi
When looking for an online alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint, one has to forget about the fancy animations that Microsoft’s tool can produce, and focus instead on the distribution channels for this presentation.
For a good alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint to win over users, presentations should be shared online through a single mouse click and it should be possible to remotely control the sequencing of slides while conferencing through a VoIP service such as Skype, thereby slashing down the costs of web-conferencing services such as WebEx.
Unfortunately, no such service is available today, but a couple are on the works. Among them, gOFFICE looks pretty interesting, for it will not only support presentations but also word processing, desktop publishing and spreadsheets. I will also keep an eye on Zoho, which might very well offer similar services in the future. In the meantime, you might want to take a look at S5 from Eric and Kathryn Meyer, AJAX-S from Robert Nyman and Imagination Cubed from GE. Many thanks to Raju Vegesna at AdventNet (the Zoho folks) for sharing the links.
Author’s note [March 3, 2006]: A good office 2.0 alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint is now available. It’s called Thumbstacks and was featured in this article. Many thanks to Assaf and Tim for pointing me to this great application.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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[…] There is no good enough Office 2.0 alternative to Microsoft PowerPointAs covered in this previous article, Office 2.0 alternatives to Microsoft PowerPoint are at the pre-alpha prototype stage right now. That’s the bad news. The good news is that several companies are working on it and the challenge is an order of magnitude simpler than developing a working spreadhseet editor in AJAX, therefore I would expect this bug to be fixed sometime in the first half of 2006. […]
I came across Thumbstacks about a week ago.
Looks pretty promising, but I have not heard much about it yet.
Tim,
Yes I did. This article covers it. Thanks for the tip!
[…] Thumbstacks is exactly what I wished for in this past article. With the ability for a presenter to invite participants and remotely control the flow of slides, here is a free alternative to expensive services such as WebEx. It won’t allow you to share a screen, but if all you want is to publish or broadcast a simple presentation with limited graphics and no animations — which no presenter should use anyway in my humble opinion, Thumbstacks does the job without requiring participants to install any kind of plugin on their web browsers. The presentation builder is effective, even though I would love to get support for hyperlinks and the much-beloved Trebuchet MS font that seems to be a staple for any Web 2.0 application. I built this simple presentation as a proof concept. […]
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