BlueTegu’s Weblog

I had to prepare a presentation for an important meeting scheduled to the end of the week. I first looked for presentation building tools. I looked at several apps from the online presentation apps list from mashable, but nothing came close to Powerpoint. So, I decided I’ll settle with powerpoint and look for a presentation sharing site I can upload my Powerpoint presentation and share it with a controlled group.

Disclaimer: I had only a day to prepare the presentation, so take my conclusions and recommendations here with a grain of salt. This is not a comprehensive research, only my experience from the tools that came up first in search and were available for immediate trial.

The presentation I prepared was rather short, it had 14 slides, and was less than half a mega byte in size. The presentation includes animation, a self prepared template with graphics and several slides that included both English and Hebrew fonts within text boxes. I saved the presentation in ppt format (not pptx).

I tried Google’s documents, slideshare, authorStream and slideboom at this order. Apart from Google, I didn’t hear of any of the other sites beforehand, and they were picked by Google-searching for ‘online presentation’ or ‘presentation share’ or similar. I didn’t bother looking into sites for which online presentation was not their main business, e.g. document or file sharing sites. The last three all convert the power point presentations to flash.

Google document’s online presentation is not mature enough. The text spilled out of several slides. This is probably because the presentation is not shown full screen, rather the right pane is kept for online chat, and the width vs. length ratio is changed. Google does not support animation either. I’m a Google fan, but this is not good enough.

Slideshare are probably doing the best online marketing, as they appear first in all relevant search. Before registering to their service I checked whether I can control with whom I can share the presentation, and they provide several options to my satisfaction. However, once I uploaded the presentation I was disappointed from the result. First, they do not support animation, at least for now. Second, my graphics looked really bad, as if the screen resolution was changed to a very course one.

I found a link to authorStream from the slideshare support forum. Someone complained about the lack of animation support, and another commented that authorStream supports animation and provided the link. I registered, uploaded the presentation and the animation worked. Well almost. all the slides the contained Hebrew fonts were not converted correctly. The ppt to flash conversion replaced the Hebrew fonts with small squares and as a result also changed the placement of the text boxes on the slide. Not good enough.

I went back to Googeling and found slideboom. The slideboom site gives the impression that they had good graphical designers and cared about how their site looks like. It doesn’t give the immediate cloned-site impression, although I have no idea whether they are leaders or followers. They do lack in documentation. It was hard to figure out whether you have the option to keep your presentation private. It turns out that you can, up to 20 private presentations. They have limited controlled-group-sharing features, basically you can either have a private presentation or share it with all. But, they did a good job in Powerpoint conversion. I uploaded the presentation and it displays animation as should, and shows the slides with combined English and Hebrew as supposed to. The resolution was fine as well. The only caveat I found is that I couldn’t run the presentation on my widescreen Debian Linux workstation. Not sure why.