If you were lying on a psychiatrist’s couch doing word association and “presentation” came up, it’s a fair bet that you would respond with “PowerPoint”.

That’s hardly surprising. Since its original development back in the 1980s, this program has gone from strength to strength – and indeed, many people would be astonished to attend a presentation that didn’t feature it.

But there are alternatives available: and Adobe has just added to their number. Acrobat.com Presentations is a free service that can be accessed by anyone with Adobe Flash Player on their computer – which Adobe claims is installed on 98 per cent of Internet-connected desktops worldwide.

So what’s good about it? Apart from the fact that it’s free, it gives you visually attractive elements such as pre-defined colour sets, intelligent image placement and graphic tools to create diagrams, flowcharts and graphs. There’s a raft of special effects too, such as slide transitions, visual gadgetry and the ability to embed videos into your presentation.

All good but hardly original, you might say. What does set Adobe’s offering apart from the herd, though, is its collaborative feature. The program lets people work together on a presentation, irrespective of where they are. And because it has simultaneous editing capabilities, no one is locked out while other people are making changes.

The program shows who has access to the presentation, who is viewing and who is editing. It even shows which slides are being worked on.

This is potentially a very interesting development. Obviously, having multiple people working on the same slide at the same time could be a recipe for disaster. But working on different areas at the same time could greatly speed up revision and enhancement of the presentation.

Because the program is located online, there’s no need to spend time waiting around while it’s emailed, worked on and sent back by your collaborators.

Once the presentation is finished, you can save it online or export it as a PDF file, safeguarding it against any service downtime.

I don’t think people are going to stop using PowerPoint. It’s just too useful for that, and too powerful a tool. But Adobe’s new kid could certainly be worth getting to know.

www.labs.adobe.com/technologies/presentations

By David Vickery

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