Product Reviews

Slide show 5.6.6 is a simple presentation program with a single, compelling selling point: it allows you to create slide shows that will run unhindered on almost any Mac without the need for extra software.

Perhaps as a penance for this, Slide Show makes presentation creation more difficult than it needs to be. It's particularly troublesome to add new files or folders. To import a file, you must click on the small file or folder icon next to each field and manually import it via a dialog box. However, Slide Show does make up for this by supporting a wide range of importable files, including JPEG, QuickTime, Photoshop, and even AutoDesk Animator-formatted files.

Things improve once the media has been imported. Files can be rearranged easily by dragging between fields, although we couldn't move a file to another page in the presentation and the sparse documentation provided little help.

You can establish a degree of control over the presentation's final output through the Presentation

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Preferences window. Optionally, a single audio file supplies the presentation's sound track, and you can specify the length of time each image should be displayed. You can also instruct the presentation to loop, and set its style from a range of predefined settings and patterns. More importantly, you can establish the level of user control in the final presentation by choosing whether or not to include a control palette, and setting the level of automation.

Slide Show's main advantage is that it can easily create standalone presentations - but they'll only work on a Mac. The standalone file is a hefty 4Mb, even before taking into account the size of the individual media files used in the presentation. This isn't so bad if you're exporting to CD-ROM, but it rules out email as a means of distributing your presentations.

Another difficulty lies in the fact that media files have to be separately copied to the same folder as the standalone application, so if your presentation contains files from varied sources, putting the show together is a lengthy task.

If Slide Show's limitations when it comes to professional presentation work are self-evident, its usefulness in other circumstances is equally apparent - particularly as the end result is impressive: smooth, attractive presentations are possible with little prior knowledge.

If you're in a Mac-only environment and need to create simple standalone presentations, Slide Show provides an effective, if quirky, route.

NEEDS Mac OS 7.1 or later, QuickTime 3 or later

HELP Unlimited email, Web