PowerPoint Alternative

[RJ Johnston]

If you ever need to extract the slides from a PowerPoint slideshow, like you sometimes receive in emails, and you don't have PowerPoint, then you can download -- for free-- Open Office from Sun Microsystems. The package includes Impress, which is PowerPoint compatible. I installed the entire package, but I think you can install just Impress. The other applications are knockoffs of Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, etc.

http://download.openoffice.org/

You can export to .SWF and .PDF as well as .png, jpeg, and others formats.

I didn't realize that Adobe Reader has a srolling feature. I opened a .PDF file with stills and turned on the scrolling feature to view the slides. For the .SWF file, I had to open it from Internet Explorer, which initially blocks access to the Shockwave player. The presentation looked better than the original .PPS I got in email. Double-clicking on the .SWF on my desktop didn't work.

In Premiere Elements, the .SWF will play back in burst mode, so I had to use timestretch to lengthen the time.

[jackfalbey]

Thanks for the tip, RJ! I don't have MS Office, and for some reason I can't get Microsoft's free PowerPoint and Excel viewers to install on my system (it keeps asking me to insert the source CD???) so hopefully this utility will allow me to view PP and Excel files...