Useful Freeware

Convert your PowerPoint documents to flash

I looked around for some time for a freeware to convert PowerPoint documents to flash (.swf) for publishing to web sites and have found only three alternatives. Both have their pros and cons, but I will just list them and not go into much details.

To test I have picked a 12 slide presentation heavy with graphics and animations. Here is what I think:

AJSoft PPT2SWF – offers a very basic user interface and very few options. Quality and dimensions can be set. Be careful not to switch to other applications during conversion, because it will capture the topmost window for some reason. I couldn’t quite make it work with transition effects either. Overall I would use this one if all other options are exhausted. The generated .swf was quite much bigger than the presentation itself.

authorPOINT Lite – Most options of the three and most polished user interface. The UI was very intuitive, even though it needs some more work on the import dialog. authorPOINT supports slide notes and titles, presenter’s logo, batch conversion for queuing multiple files (a very useful feature since the conversion may be slow). The produced flash presentation is very nice looking and you can choose from several different templates for the presentation and the presentation contains a Print button. The generated folder with files was about twice as small than the .ppt file and took about 25% of the time it took PPT2SWF. Very nice application and strongly recommended! This would be my first choice when I do a conversion.

Speechi Light – Installs as a add-on to PowerPoint and creates it’s own menu. There are no settings at all in the light version. Just a simple Print to Flash. It generated the smallest set of files about 20% of the .ppt file size and was the fastest. The quality of the generated view is very good, but it has the large Speechi logo in two places in the presentation. It would be my second choice if authorPOINT didn’t work. Another annoyance is that in order to download and install you must register with their web-site and activate the product after installation. Generated content on the left.

My conclusion is that authorPOINT Lite is far ahead of the other two in both capabilities and options for generated content.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2007 at 1:03 am and is filed under Internet, Productivity. Find similar posts by selecting any of the following tags: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.