Product Reviews

Any presentations program that hopes to compete with the ubiquitous PowerPoint needs to have some pretty good tricks up its sleeve. The latest version of Opus Presenter does indeed come up with one genuinely novel idea that is worth investigating.

Presenter's great strength is that it is more than just a presentations program. In fact, it's more akin to interactive authoring programs, such as Macromedia's Director, than PowerPoint, as it allows you to add interactive 'actions' to elements within a presentation. This means you can create training materials such as multiple choice questionnaires, rather than just simple presentations that are played to a passive audience.

This extra power means that Presenter is more complex than PowerPoint, but Opus has cleverly designed the program so that it runs in two different modes. The Extended mode provides access to the program's full range of interactive authoring features, while Presentation mode hides some of the more complex features in order to concentrate on the core presentation tools that will appeal to ordinary business users.

It's

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those business users that Opus is thinking about with Presenter's most important new feature, the Brainstorm Editor. Usually, when you start work on a new presentation, you put it together one slide at a time. However, with the Brainstorm Editor you also have the option of working in a more freeform fashion that may better suit you.

This Editor is a large window that is split into upper and lower halves. The lower half is called the ThinkPad, which allows you to type ideas or bits of information randomly on the page. You can then start to organise your presentation by dragging and dropping items from the ThinkPad into the upper half of the Editor, known as the Presentation Plan.

As well as entering text into the Editor, you can add links to graphics, audio and video clips and, when you've gathered all the required content for the presentation, hit the 'OK' button to launch the New Presentation wizard. This asks you a few questions about the appearance of the presentation and then collates the material to create a nice tidy set of slides.

It's a clever idea, and it works very well once you've got the hang of it. The sheer novelty takes some getting used to, though, and you don't get much help from the sparsely illustrated New Features manual. This sometimes makes it hard to relate the instructions in the manual to what you actually see on your computer screen.

There's no doubt that Presenter 04 offers business users the scope to go far beyond the average PowerPoint presentation. However, it's not quite as easy to use as the developers seem to think, and better documentation would help to tempt business users away from PowerPoint.