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Powerpoint sucks - what to use instead?

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tsaint:
If you do visit the link I gave and then want to view the example pages, use opera to do so if you have it (the 4th example does work by the way)
 

JavaJones:
Ohhh! Yeah they look/work totally different with Opera. Interesting. The backgrounds and general formatting still suck, but you get the idea.

- Oshyan

Jabberwock:
How about good old MS Word?

I suppose it is not that nice presentation-wise (although I bet you could fool quite a few people with fullscreen print preview), but you do have much more control over the style vs. content. As long as there is no "manual" formatting used, you have some of the things you ask for... Namely, use of a template allows you to give an underlining style structure, it can be updated after the presentations are created, etc.

Other things you mentioned could be done as well (such photo sizing, cropping, aligning), but that would require writing several macros. However, once you have them, they can be attached to the same template so the users can apply them as required.

Edit: jumped in from the newsletter, didn't noticed it's quite old...

JavaJones:
Thanks for the reply Jabberwock. Late April is too old? :D Well I'm still looking for a solution, so input continues to be appreciated.

While you make some interesting points about Word, I'm not aware of it being able to truly lock down formatting in the way that I want. It's funny actually, because it's rare that I actually want to impose *more* limits on an application, but in this case it's really best to avoid the ability for content authors to "get creative" with layout and design. I've seen first hand that the end results are seldom better than a simple, generic layout. The trick is enforcing layout and design standards. Also does Word have the ability to easily update the style across multiple documents? For example if we later decide we want to change our font from Arial to Times, could we do this to 50 Word documents without opening and applying a style to each one? Think of how this would work with CSS - I would change the single CSS file that every document references, and viola! It's done.

Anyway, as you can probably see, I'm still thinking an HTML and CSS based solution may be the ticket. But no progress on developing that thus far on my end...

- Oshyan

Jabberwock:
The "lock down" depends on how obedient the users are :) Templates allow you to reassign key shortcuts, menus and toolbars (at least in 2003, I'm not sure about 2007), so in a way that takes away ability to mess up the document manually, but it is not that difficult to circumvent (so some user discipline is required). Instead, you could give them large buttons titled e.g. "Main heading", "Bullet point" etc. that would be linked to particular styles.

If a document is tied to a template, it should update automatically to the changes in the template whenever it is opened. Unfortunately, it is rather easy to modify the formatting (so it shows up as "Style + Arial", for example) - then of course manual overrides remain, even if the template is changed. Still, you could have a macro that reapplies the styles if needed (based on this tip):

http://www.elharo.com/blog/word/2005/12/28/word-tip-1-reapplying-styles/

Another option is to link documents in a master document - this allows to modify all of them at the same time without opening each inidividual document. The disadvantage is that each document has to be linked to the master manually, which might get tedious. Also, with a large number of documents this might become unwieldy.

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