Harvard Graphics Advanced Presentations

Product Description

Review Remember Harvard Graphics? The former presentation graphics industry leader has wakened from its hibernation to show it hasn't lost any of its famous ease-of-use features -- while adding some worthwhile new ones. This version, called Advanced Presentations, offers new 3D transition effects, talking animated characters, additional design options, and improved import and export filters for PowerPoint. You'll find the new 3D effects in dozens of screen-to-screen transition effects. One group of transitions is titled Virtual Worlds. Think of putting each slide on a billboard, and when you press "play" the program simulates a drive down a roadway, and as you approach a billboard around each bend, you'll see the next slide. Other Virtual World settings put your slides as framed art along a corridor or as sheets of paper emerging from a folder sitting on a table. Other 3D transitions are built-in, though I had to choose a lower screen resolution and fewer colors in order to get acceptable speed. In the tiny preview window everything looked good; in full screen, things were considerably slower. In PowerPoint, such effects are available as add-ons from third-party vendors, most notably Crystal Graphics. In Advanced Presentations they're built in. The other new bright spot is animation in the form of four figures. You can choose one of four figures (a robot, wizard, parrot, or genie) on a slide (one per presentation), specify where the figure is to move (always starting in the upper left corner), and choose a pose (puzzled, welcoming, and so on). The program even has the smarts to perch the parrot so its feet caressed a bubble in my presentation's template. You can also specify the text the figure will read to your audience; and each word of your text appears in a bubble (see illustration) as it is spoken. It was easy to understand what was being said, though the "closed captioning" also helped. At the right of the design workspace is the new Studio Bar that offers 80 color palettes, 250 slide styles, object effects (bullets fly in from the side or appear along with the sound of typewriter keys clicking), graphic fills, and fonts (selected for their readability when projected). You can easily lose yourself amid the thousands of permutations and combinations. The thumbnails of the pre-designed styles don't do them justice - they actually more professional than the thumbnails indicate. There are dozens of special QuickShapes with built-in smarts. Drag a rectangle onto the slide and the program adds a slider bar to one side. Drag the slider and you change the number of points on the polygon, so it's easy to create a triangle or octagon. You can likewise change the number of points on a star, the roundness of a rectangle's corners, the shape of an arrow, and so forth. You can publish your presentation as a "WebShow." When viewed over the Web, users only need the Macromedia Flash plug-in (which is widely available). (click to see larger image) Rather than build a presentation from scratch, use Quick Presentations.Advanced Presentations maintains some of the classic features of previous versions. For example, Quick Presentations fills out a multi-slide presentation with sample text; PowerPoint offers a similar feature. A "company presentation" Quick Presentation fills in a bullet list of goals, an agenda with times already filled in, and so on, on the theory that it's easier to edit text on such a slide than to create it from scratch (and it is). The Advisor offers step-by-step guidance or design advice; advice changes by the type of slide you're creating (bullet list, chart, and so forth). I'd still like to see more lively charts - where pie slices fly in or the chart itself is animated. Oddly, none of the new animation features do much to enhance what can be a deadly dull chart slide. Harvard Graphics Advanced Presentations is loaded with useful tools for building an engaging presentation. While the animated characters may seem "c