If you are a Microsoft PowerPoint user there is one thing that could possibly make it a much better program for you.  The addition I am thinking of would be the ability to run a PowerPoint show with PowerPoint as a movie.  In other words you make a link from your web site or place it on a CD and the show just starts and runs by itself.

Well it happens that this week I stumbled into one that does just that.  The program is called, “iSpring Free” and their main site is located at ispringsolutions.com.  For the actual free software click here.

Note that they have two other versions which are several hundreds of dollars; however, the one that I am reviewing here is free and seems to work very well.

I received an email this week from a relative with a PowerPoint show entitled, “How Many do you Recognize”.  This show gives you a recent picture of a celebrity and allows you to guess who they were years ago.  Since everyone changes as they age it was hard to recognize some of them.  I created a movie with iSpring which was much easy and fun to use.

I have been playing with it for a few days and it is very easy to use.  After you install the software you open PowerPoint just as you always have and you have a new menu item labeled, “iSpring Converter”.

Once you have a slide show designed you use the new iSpring menu and create a Flash file (.swf) with all needed webpages.  To make this work in the old days (a year or two ago) would have intimidated most users but with this program it is a snap.

There is something else interesting I discovered about iSpring.  The PowerPoint show that I created for web use was about 9mb in size.  The iSpring files were about 5mb in size (and included music which PP didn’t) and both of these shows used the same 65 slides.  iSpring provides you with some considerable size savings.

This program allows you to have an easy to use animated PowerPoint show which can be run automatically with slides changing at a prescribed rate or the user may click through them as they wish.

This is really the best of all worlds for preparing a PowerPopint presentation for the web.  There are other uses too.  Give it a try and let me know what you think about iSpring.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 6:03 am and is filed under Columns. 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.