John Crumpton

Adobe is working on a web-based PowerPoint alternative called Presentations, built in Flash.

It seems to have the same feature set as PowerPoint, however it’s all through the browser so different people can login and review/make changes. I like the fact you can share your work-in-progress presentation with your designer then login again to see what design improvements they’ve made. Saves sending all the back and forth versions through email for little changes.

It exports to PDF, however you can play your presentation through the browser.

It’s also completely free and they don’t have plans to charge for it as yet.

Try it out yourself at Adobe Labs.

PowerPoint has an annoying feature of hiding menu items which you don’t often use. You have to click on the double arrows at the bottom of the menus to reveal the other items.

To turn this off, choose TOOLs -> CUSTOMIZE, then Options and tick “Always show full menus”. While you are there, ticking “Show Standard and Formatting toolsbars on two rows” will allow you to access more options for both toolbars.