All about presentations

Since Articulate and iSpring have free full-functional trial versions I downloaded both of the programs without hesitation and installed on my PC. I created a simple test PowerPoint presentation and converted it to flash first with Articulate Presenter 5.3 Pro, then with iSpring Pro 3.2. The results speak for themselves.

First of all I would like to show you the original PowerPoint presentation I created for testing the software:
http://freeoxygen.net/katarina/my_test.pptx

I didn’t find a way to upload .swf generated by Articulate here that is why I made a link where you can view it:
http://freeoxygen.net/katarina/Articulate_swf/my_test/player.html

and a couple of screenshots below:

Now it’s turn for iSpring:

Results I received after conversion were much of a surprise for me. After conversion there were just two slides converted 100% right by Articulate Presenter 5.3 Pro, as for iSpring Pro 3.2 – all of the slides were accurately converted!This is the list of situations and objects Articulate Presenter 5.3 Pro has conversion troubles with:
1. Emboss style, bullets, numbering (slide 2)
2. Dashed lines (see yellow line, arrow and dashed red line on slide 3)
3. Connected shapes (slide 4)
4. Size (shape 3 in the first row) and positioning (figure 4: where is it?) (slide 5)
5. All of the diagrams and charts are in raster after conversion (slide 6)
6. Animation (supposed to be on slide 7) Oh well, and I didn’t even include sounds, videos or transition effects in my test PowerPoint presentation. Anyway, as for the positive side of Articulate Presenter 5.3 Pro – it does create SCORM compatible content which can be put in LMS (iSpring Pro 3.2 doesn’t) but as for me the conversion quality of PowerPoint to flash converter is the main factor. Below you will see my final comparison table “Articulate vs iSpring” based on my personal experience and needs.

As we can see from the table above iSpring Pro 3.2 gives you a better quality of conversion at a lower price ($199). Their advertisement texts are real true. Remember “Even if you are a PowerPoint beginner iSpring makes all Flash technology advantages work for you!”? And this was so for me. iSpring didn’t disappoint my expectations. Congratulations to iSpring and THANKS for such a solid software!

I hope that this article is useful for you. May be you have your own experience of using ppt to flash converter? It will be interesting for me know what you think. Please, feel free to share your thoughts and ideas.

PS I hope you didn’t forget to install Adobe Flash player to make your slideshow work.

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Hi! Today I am going to talk about PowerPoint to flash converters. I am not a Flash expert, I just want to share my experience with you and hope it will be helpful. Let’s start!

Presentations are a great way to explain and actually “show” the material. Watching a bright and informative presentation used to help me to make the lesson information stick in the memory for a long time. PowerPoint presentation is great tool but sometimes I were in trouble when I was not able to open a video or audio file inserted or the file was too big. I also wanted my presentations to be web-compatible.

I came to the conclusion that the time for buying PowerPoint to Flash converter came. I was ready for the purchase, so rapidly typed in a simple phrase “powerpoint to flash converter” in the Google search and… Wow! I was surprised how many results I came up with! The question “Which one is the best and right for me?” was in my head. Not to make a mistake I decided to give these converters kind of a “test-drive”. You don’t buy a car before you drive it, right? How? I was a little confused at first, so I looked up some information on PowerPoint to flash: Robin Good’s MasterNewMedia , Indezine and some others. I was not able to find any comparisson table and created my own system.
I began with choosing top 7 PowerPoint to flash converters as they as they appeared more often in my Google search results list. Now I am happy to annouce you my “experimental” software:

Number 1 PowerCONVERTER presented by PresentationPro, Inc. “The most accurate PowerPoint to Flash converter” as the advertisement promised me.

Number 2 Articulate Presenter by Articulate Global, Inc. with “View a Demo” note which catched my attention right away.

Number 3 iSpring Pro by iSpringSolutions, Inc. and their promise “Even if you are a PowerPoint beginner iSpring makes all Flash technology advantages work for you!” Sounds great to me!

These three above give lot’s of promises… Hm… a good chance to check if the advertisement ever tells the truth
I also tried FlashPoint (FlashDemo, Inc.), conaito PPT-to-Flash Converter (conaito Technologies), Wondershare PPT2Flash Professional (Wondershare Software Co., Ltd.) and authorPOINT (authorGEN Technologies).

Anyway after these 7 were chosen I went to the web site of each of them and found out that features they offer are pretty much the same. It put me in the confusion even more and I decided to create a table with 20 features most valuable for me and see which PowerPoint to flash converter has most of them. To make my choice process easier I decided to score each of the software offered. Please, note that I didn’t try all of these converters, I just looked at their web sites for more information. Anyway below you will find the table I’ve got.

According to my table Articulate Presenter and iSpring Pro both have the same score and are good for me. So which one is better? I’ll give you an answer in my next article before this one becomes too long.

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